
Class U- Z' ■- ^ -d | 



Book 



CopyrightN?_ 



Ct 



C.OEMRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



The Effect of the War of 1812 Upon the Consolidation 
of the Union — Johns Hopkins University Press, 
1887 — 30 pp. 

True and False Democracy— Charles Scribner's Sons, 
1915 (First Edition, The Macmillan Co., 1907) 
— xii + 111 pp. 

The American as He Is — Charles Scribner's Sons, 1915 
(First Edition, The Macmillan Co., 1908) — x -f- 
104 pp. 

Philosophy — Columbia University Press, 191 1 — vii + 
5i PP- 

Why Should We Change Our Form of Govern- 
ment ? — Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912 — xv -f- 
159 PP- 

The International Mind — Charles Scribner's Sons. 
1913 — x +121 pp. 

The Meaning of Education — Charles Scribner's Sons, 
1915 (First Edition, The Macmillan Co., 1898)— 
xiii + 385 pp. 

A World in Ferment — Charles Scribner's Sons, 
1 9 18 — viii +254 pp. 

Is America Worth Saving?— Charles Scribner's Son" 
1920 — xiii + 398 pp. 



SCHOLARSHIP 

AND 

SERVICE 



' SCHOLARSHIP 

AND 

SERVICE 

THE POLICIES AND IDEALS OF A NATIONAL UNIVERSITY 
IN A MODERN DEMOCRACY 



BY 

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 

PRESIDENT OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1921 
Cotfv X 



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Copyright, 1921, bv /V / 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published September, 192 1 



OCT -6 I9?l 



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TMft SCRIBNER PRESS 



©CLA624714 



TO THE TRUSTEES, FACULTIES, ALUMNI, AND 
STUDENTS OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, PAST AND 
PRESENT, WHO HAVE HELPED TO BUILD A LIGHT- 
HOUSE OF LEARNING TO THE END THAT NEW 
GENERATIONS OF MEN MAY BE GUIDED TO KNOW 
THE TRUTH WHICH SHALL MAKE THEM FREE 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Introduction xi 

UNIVERSITY IDEALS 

I Scholarship and Service i 

II From King's College to Columbia Uni- 
versity, 1754-1904 , 17 

III The University and the City 47 

IV The Service of the University 53 

V Memory and Faith 69 

UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS 

VI The University President, University 

Teacher, and University Student ... 79 

VII The American College 95 

VIII The Academic Career . 11 1 

IX Different Types of Academic Teacher . 117 

X Methods of University Teaching .... 125 

XI College and University Teaching .... 131 

XII Modern Foreign Language Study .... 141 

XIII True Vocational Preparation ...... 147 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 



PAGE 



XIV Criticism of University Professors . 153 

XV Government and Administration . . . 161 

XVI Making Liberal Men and Women . . 177 

XVII The New Paganism 191 

XVIII The Building of Character 201 

UNIVERSITY COUNSELS 

XIX Worthy Companionship . 207 

XX Reasonableness 213 

XXI Steadfast in the Faith 217 

XXII The New Call to Service 227 

XXIII Columbia and the War 231 

XXIV The Conquests of War and of Peace 243 
XXV Clear Thinking 251 

XXVI The Gospel of Hope 257 

XXVII Personal Responsibility 263 

XXVIII Thinking for One's Self 269 

XXIX The Spirit of Unrest ........ 275 

XXX' Lynch-Law . 283 

XXXI Contact with the First-Rate .... 289 

XXXII Integrity 295 



CONTENTS ix 



PAGE 



XXXIII Intellectual Charity 301 

XXXIV The Age of Irrationalism 309 

XXXV Success 317 

XXXVI Thoroughness . 323 

XXXVII Liberty 329 

XXXVIII The Open Mind 337 

XXXIX The Kingdom of Light 345 

XL A World in Ferment 353 

XLI New Values 359 

XLII Discipline 365 

XLIII Captains of a Great Effort 373 

XLIV Faith in the Future 381 

Index 387 



INTRODUCTION 

Of all institutions which modern man has built to 
give form and purpose to his civilization, the university 
is least understood. The law, the state, the church 
are eagerly discussed and disputed, but their meaning 
is a matter of general agreement. That the same 
may not be said of the university is due in large part 
to the university itself. The university has persisted 
in looking upon itself, and therefore has been largely 
looked upon, as merely an advanced type of school 
for the training of youth. In fact, however, the train- 
ing of youth is a mere incident in the work of the 
modern university, which has been brought into being 
primarily to satisfy and to give body to the restless 
search of the human spirit for truth. It is the busi- 
ness of the university untiringly to seek for truth in 
all its forms, to hold fast to truth once gained, and to 
interpret it. The university in modern life represents, 
as did the cathedral in the Middle Ages, the noblest 
convictions and emotions of the human spirit. The 
cathedral was used as a place of religious worship to 
be sure, but its pointed arches, its pinnacles, and its 
majestic and harmonious beauty added to worship 
a physical expression of the noblest aspiration of those 
peoples who were then in the van of civilization. In 

like manner the university is certainly a place where 

si 



xii INTRODUCTION 

youth are taught, but its existence, its many-sided 
activity, and its wide-spread influence give evidence 
of the purpose of mankind to make new conquests of 
the unknown and new uses of those conquests. The 
university that is not conscious of its real meaning 
and of the part which it may play in the history of 
the life of civilized man is a university in name only. 
The papers that follow are an effort to interpret 
the modern university in terms of its ideals, of its prob- 
lems, and of its counsels. Although the illustrations 
are drawn from the life of but one university, the prin- 
ciples which they make plain are common to all uni- 
versities worthy of the name that seek to minister to 
the mind and the spirit of man, organized in his mod- 
ern democratic society. 

Nicholas Murray Butler 

Columbia University 

in the City of New York 
June I, 1921 



I 

SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE 



Inaugural address as twelfth president of Columbia University, 

April 19, 1902 



SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE 

President Roosevelt, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the 
Trustees, my associates of the faculties, alumni and 
students of Columbia, our welcome guests, ladies and 
gentlemen : 

For these kindly and generous greetings I am pro- 
foundly grateful. To make adequate response to 
them is beyond my power. The words that have been 
spoken humble as well as inspire. They express a con- 
fidence and a hopefulness which it will tax human 
capacity to the utmost to justify, while they picture a 
possible future for this university which fires the 
imagination and stirs the soul. We may truthfully say 
of Columbia, as Daniel Webster said of Massachusetts, 
that her past, at least, is secure; and we look into the 
future with high hope and happy augury. 

To-day it would be pleasant to dwell upon the labors 
and the service of the splendid body of men and 
women, the university's teaching scholars, in whose 
keeping the honor and the glory of Columbia rest. 
Their learning, their devotion, and their skill call 
gratitude to the heart and words of praise to the lips. 
It would be pleasant, too, to think aloud of the pro- 
cession of men which has gone out from Columbia's 
doors for well-nigh a century and a half to serve God 
and the state; and of those younger ones who are even 

3 



4 SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE 

now lighting the lamps of their lives at the altar-fires 
of eternal truth. Equally pleasant would it be to 
pause to tell those who labor with us — north, south, 
east, and west — and our nation's schools, higher and 
lower alike, how much they have taught us and by 
what bonds of affection and fellow service we are 
linked to them. 

All these themes crowd the mind as we reflect upon 
the significance of the ideals which we are gathered to 
celebrate; for this is no personal function. The pass- 
ing of position or power from one servant of the uni- 
versity to another is but an incident; the university 
itself is lasting, let us hope eternal. Its spirit and its 
life, its usefulness and its service, are the proper sub- 
ject for our contemplation to-day. 

The shifting panorama of the centuries reveals 
three separate and underlying forces which shape and 
direct the higher civilization. Two of these have a 
spiritual character, and one appears to be, in part, at 
least, economic, although clearer vision may one day 
show that they all spring from a common source. 
These three forces are the church, the state, and 
science, or better, scholarship. Many have been their 
interdependences and manifold their intertwinings. 
Now one, now another seems uppermost. Charle- 
magne, Hildebrand, Darwin are central figures, each 
for his time. At one epoch these forces are in alliance, 
at another in opposition. Socrates died in prison, 
Bruno at the stake. Marcus Aurelius sat on an em- 
peror's throne, and Thomas Aquinas ruled the mind of 



SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE 5 

a universal church. All else is tributary to these 
three, and we grow in civilization as mankind comes to 
recognize the existence and the importance of each. 

It is commonplace that in the earliest family com- 
munity church and state were one. The patriarch was 
both ruler and priest. There was neither division of 
labor nor separation of function. When development 
took place, church and state, while still substantially 
one, had distinct organs of expression. These often 
clashed, and the separation of the two principles was 
thereby hastened. As yet scholarship had hardly any 
representatives. When they did begin to appear, when 
science and philosophy took their rise, they were often 
prophets without honor either within or without their 
own country, and were either misunderstood or perse- 
cuted by church and state alike. But the time came 
when scholarship, truth-seeking for its own sake, had 
so far justified itself that both church and state united 
to give it permanent organization and a visible body. 
This organization and body was the university. For 
nearly ten centuries — a period longer than the history 
of parliamentary government or of Protestantism — the 
university has existed to embody the spirit of scholar- 
ship. Its arms have been extended to every science 
and to all letters. It has known periods of doubt, of 
weakness, and of obscurantism; but the spirit which 
gave it life has persisted and has overcome every ob- 
stacle. To-day, in the opening century, the univer- 
sity proudly asserts itself in every civilized land, not 
least in our own, as the bearer of a tradition and the 



6 SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE 

servant of an ideal without which life would be barren, 
and the two remaining principles which underlie civili- 
zation robbed of half their power. To destroy the 
university would be to turn back the hands upon the 
dial of history for centuries; to cripple it is to put 
shackles upon every forward movement that we prize 
— research, industry, commerce, the liberal and prac- 
tical arts and sciences. To support and enhance it is 
to set free new and vitalizing energy in every field of 
human endeavor. Scholarship has shown the world 
that knowledge is convertible into comfort, prosperity, 
and success, as well as into new and higher types of 
social order and of spirituality. "Take fast hold of 
instruction," said the Wise Man; "let her not go: keep 
her; for she is thy life." 

Man's conception of what is most worth knowing 
and reflecting upon, of what may best compel his 
scholarly energies, has changed greatly with the years. 
His earliest impressions were of his own insignificance 
and of the stupendous powers and forces by which he 
was surrounded and ruled. The heavenly fires, the 
storm-cloud and the thunderbolt, the rush of waters 
and the change of seasons, all filled him with an awe 
which straightway saw in them manifestations of the 
superhuman and the divine. Man was absorbed in 
nature, a mythical and legendary nature to be sure, 
but still the nature out of which science was one day 
to arise. Then, at the call of Socrates, he turned his 
back on nature and sought to know himself; to learn 
the secrets of those mysterious and hidden processes by 



SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE 7 

which he felt and thought and acted. The intellectual 
centre of gravity had passed from nature to man. 
From that day to this the goal of scholarship has been 
the understanding of both nature and man, the unit- 
ing of them in one scheme or plan of knowledge, and 
the explaining of them as the offspring of the omnipo- 
tent activity of a Creative Spirit, the Christian God. 
Slow and painful have been the steps toward the goal 
which to St. Augustine seemed so near at hand, but 
which has receded through the intervening centuries 
as the problems grew more complex and as the processes 
of inquiry became so refined that whole worlds of new 
and unsuspected facts revealed themselves. Scholars 
divided into two camps. The one would have ultimate 
and complete explanations at any cost; the other, over- 
come by the greatness of the undertaking, held that 
no explanation in a large or general way was possible. 
The one camp bred sciolism; the other narrow and 
helpless specialization. 

At this point the modern university problem took 
its rise; and for over four hundred years the university 
has been striving to adjust its organization so that it 
may most effectively bend its energies to the solution 
of the problem as it is. For this purpose the uni- 
versity's scholars have unconsciously divided them- 
selves into three types or classes: those who investigate 
and break new ground; those who explain, apply, and 
make understandable the fruits of new investigation; 
and those philosophically minded teachers who relate 
the new to the old, and, without dogma or intolerance, 



8 SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE 

point to the lessons taught by the developing human 
spirit from its first blind gropings toward the light on 
the uplands of Asia or by the shores of the Mediter- 
ranean, through the insights of the world's great poets, 
artists, scientists, philosophers, statesmen, and priests, 
to its highly organized institutional and intellectual 
life of to-day. The purpose of scholarly activity re- 
quires for its accomplishment men of each of these 
three types. They are allies, not enemies; and happy 
the age, the people, or the university in which all three 
are well represented. It is for this reason that the 
university which does not strive to widen the bound- 
aries of human knowledge, to tell the story of the new 
in terms that those familiar with the old can under- 
stand, and to put before its students a philosophical 
interpretation of historic civilization, is, I think, fall- 
ing short of the demands which both society and uni- 
versity ideals themselves may fairly make. 

A group of distinguished scholars in separate and 
narrow fields can no more constitute a university than 
a bundle of admirably developed nerves, without a 
brain and spinal cord, can produce all the activities of 
the human organism. It may be said, I think, of the 
unrelated and unexplained specialist, as Matthew Ar- 
nold said of the Puritan, that he is in great danger 
because he imagines himself in possession of a rule 
telling him the unum necessarium, or one thing need- 
ful; that he then remains satisfied with a very 
crude conception of what this rule really is, and what 
it tells him; and in this dangerous state of assurance 



SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE Q 

and self-satisfaction proceeds to give full swing to a 
number of the instincts of his ordinary self. And 
these instincts, since he is but human, are toward a 
general view of the world from the very narrow and 
isolated spot on which he stands. Only the largest 
and bravest spirits can become great specialists in 
scholarship and resist this instinctive tendency to 
hasty and crude philosophizing. The true scholar is 
one who has been brought to see the full meaning of 
the words development and history. He must, in 
other words, be a free man as Aristotle understood the 
term. The free man is he who has a largeness of view 
which is unmistakable and which permits him to see 
the other side; a knowledge of the course of man's 
intellectual history and its meaning; a grasp of prin- 
ciples and a standard for judging them; the power 
and habit of reflection firmly established; a fine feel- 
ing for moral and intellectual distinctions; and the 
kindliness of spirit and nobility of purpose which are 
the support of genuine character. On this foundation 
highly specialized knowledge is scholarship; on a 
foundation of mere skill, deftness, or erudition it is 
not. The university is concerned with the promotion 
of the true scholarship. It asks it in its scholars who 
teach; it inculcates it in its scholars who learn. It 
believes that the languages, the literatures, the art, the 
science, and the institutions of those historic peoples 
who have successively occupied the centre of the stage 
on which the great human drama is being acted out 
are full of significance for the world of to-day; and it 



io SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE 

asks that those students who come to it to be led into 
special fields of inquiry, of professional study, or of 
practical application, shall have come to know some- 
thing of all this in an earlier period of general and 
liberal studies. 

Emerson's oration before the oldest American so- 
ciety of scholars, made nearly sixty-five years ago, 
is the magnetic pole toward which all other discussions 
of scholarship must inevitably point. His superb 
apology for scholarship and for the scholar as Man 
Thinking opened an era in our nation's intellectual 
life. The scholar, as Emerson drew him, is not 
oppressed by nature or averse from it, for he knows it 
as the opposite of his soul, answering to it part for 
part. He is not weighed down by books or by the 
views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have 
given, for he knows that they were young men like 
himself when they wrote their books and gave their 
views. He is not a recluse or unfit for practical work, 
because he knows that every opportunity for action 
passed by is a loss of power. The scholar, in short, as 
the university views him and aims to conserve and to 
produce him and his type, is a free man, thinking and 
acting in the light of the world's knowledge and guided 
by its highest ideals. 

In this sense the university is the organ of scholar- 
ship, and in this sense it aims to be its embodiment. 
The place of scholarship has been long since won and 
is more widely recognized and acknowledged than ever 
before. The church and the state which first gave it 



SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE n 

independence are in close alliance with it and it with 
them. The three are uniting in the effort to produce a 
reverent, well-ordered, and thoughtful democratic civi- 
lization in which the eternal standards of righteous- 
ness and truth will increasingly prevail. 

But a university is not for scholarship alone. In 
these modern days the university is not apart from the 
activities of the world, but in them and of them. It 
deals with real problems and it relates itself to life as 
it is. The university is for both scholarship and ser- 
vice; and herein lies that ethical quality which makes 
the university a real person, bound by its very nature 
to the service of others. To fulfil its high calling the 
university must give and give freely to its students, 
to the world of learning and of scholarship, to the de- 
velopment of trade, commerce, and industry, to the 
community in which it has its home, and to the state 
and nation whose foster-child it is. A university's 
capacity for service is the rightful measure of its im- 
portunity. The university's service is to-day far 
greater, far more expensive, and in ways far more 
numerous than ever before. It has only lately learned 
to serve, and hence it has only lately learned the possi- 
bilities that lie open before it. Every legitimate de- 
mand for guidance, for leadership, for expert knowl- 
edge, for trained skill, for personal service, it is the 
bounden duty of the university to meet. It may not 
urge that it is too busy accumulating stores of learning 
and teaching students. Serve it must, as well as ac- 
cumulate and teach, upon pain of loss of moral power 



12 SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE 

and impairment of usefulness. At every call it must 

show that it is: 

„ f 
"Strong for service still, and unimpaired." i 

The time-old troubles of town and gown are relics 
of an academic aloofness which was never desirable 
and which is no longer possible. 

In order to prepare itself for efficient service the uni- 
versity must count in its ranks men competent to be 
the intellectual and spiritual leaders of the nation and 
competent to train others for leadership. Great per- 
sonalities make great universities. And great person- 
alities must be left free to grow and express themselves, 
each in his own way, if they are to reach a maximum of 
efficiency. 

Spiritual life is subject neither to mathematical rule 
nor to chemical analysis. Rational freedom is the goal 
toward which the human spirit moves, slowly but ir- 
resistibly, as the solar system toward a point in the 
constellation Hercules; and rational freedom is the 
best method for its movement. Moreover, different 
subjects in the field of knowledge and its applications 
require different approach and different treatment. 
It is the business of the university to foster each and 
all. It gives its powerful support to the learned pro- 
fessions, whose traditional number has of late been 
added to by architecture, engineering, and teaching, 
all of which are closely interwoven with the welfare of 
the community. It urges forward its investigators in 
every department, and rewards their achievements 



SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE 13 

with the academic laurel. It studies the conditions 
under which school and college education may best be 
given, and it takes active part in advancing them. In 
particular, it guards the priceless treasure of that 
liberal learning which I have described as underlying 
all true scholarship, and gives to it full-hearted care 
and protection. These are all acts of service direct 
and powerful. 

The university does still more. It lends its members 
for expert and helpful service to nation, state, and 
city. University men are rapidly mobilized for diplo- 
matic service, for the negotiation of important treaties, 
for the administration of dependencies, for special and 
confidential service to the government, or some depart- 
ment of it, and, the task done, they return quietly to 
the ranks of teaching scholars, as the soldiers in the 
armies of the war between the States went back to 
civil life without delay or friction. These same uni- 
versity men are found foremost in the ranks of good 
citizenship everywhere and as laymen in the service of 
the church. They carry hither and yon their practical 
idealism, their disciplined minds, and their full in- 
formation, and no human interest is without their 
helpful and supporting strength. It is in ways like 
these that the university has shown, a thousand times, 
that sound theory and correct practice are two sides 
of a shield. A theorist is one who sees, and the prac- 
tical man must be in touch with theory if he is to see 
what it is that he does. 

What the future development of the great univer- 



14 SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE 

sities is to be perhaps no one can foresee. But this 
much is certain : Every city which, because of its size 
or wealth or position, aims to be a centre of enlighten- 
ment and a true world-capital must be the home of a 
great university. Here students and teachers will 
throng by the mere force of intellectual gravitation, 
and here service will abound from the mere host of op- 
portunities. The city, not in its corporate capacity 
but as a spiritual entity, will be the main support of 
the university, and the university in turn will be the 
chief servant of the city's higher life. True citizens 
will vie with each other in strengthening the university 
for scholarship and for service. In doing so they can 
say, with Horace, that they have builded themselves 
monuments more lasting than bronze and loftier than 
the pyramids reared by kings, monuments which neither 
flood nor storm nor the long flight of years can over- 
turn or destroy. Sir John de Balliol, doing a penance 
fixed by the abbot of Durham; Walter de Merton, 
making over his manor house and estates to secure to 
others the advantages which he had not himself en- 
joyed; John Harvard, leaving half his property and 
his library to the infant college by the Charles, and 
Elihu Yale, giving money and his books to the col- 
legiate school in New Haven, have written their names 
on the roll of the immortals and have conferred untold 
benefits upon the human race. Who were their wealthy, 
I powerful, and high-born contemporaries ? Where are 
they in the grateful esteem of the generations that 
have come after them ? What service have they made 



SCHOLARSHIP AND SERVICE 15 

possible ? What now avails their wealth, their power, 
their high birth ? Balliol, Merton, Harvard, Yale are 
names known wherever the English language is spoken 
and beyond. They signify high purpose, zeal for learn- 
ing, opposition to philistinism and ignorance. They 
are closely interwoven with the social, the religious, 
the political, the literary history of our race. Where 
else are there monuments such as theirs ? 

Scholarship and service are the true university's 
ideal. The university of to-day is not the "home of 
lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular 
names, and impossible loyalties." It keeps step with 
the march of progress, widens its sympathies with 
growing knowledge, and among a democratic people 
seeks only to instruct, to uplift, and to serve, in order 
that the cause of religion and learning, and of human 
freedom and opportunity, may be continually advanced 
from century to century and from age to age. 



II 



FROM KING'S COLLEGE TO 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, 

1754-1904 



An oration in commemoration of the One Hundred and Fiftieth 
Anniversary of the foundation of King's College, delivered at 
Columbia University, October 31, 1904 






FROM KING'S COLLEGE TO COLUMBIA 
UNIVERSITY, 1754-1904 

We are standing by one of the lines which imagina- 
tion draws across the changeless chart of time. We 
instinctively stop and look back. The mere flight of 
time itself fills our minds with reverent wonder, and 
we measure it off* by decades and by centuries that 
we may the better comprehend it. Yet it is not the 
flight of time, but the story of accomplishment in 
time — time's quality, may we say ? — which instructs, 
stimulates, and spurs us on. The record of the past 
brings us knowledge of the subtle processes by which 
ideas weave for themselves a material fabric. It counts 
for us the steps by which man climbs the lofty heights 
of his ideals. 

What one hundred and fifty years of recorded time 
is filled so full as the period of our university's life ? 
When before have the face of nature and the mind of 
man both been so radically changed ? The first presi- 
dent of King's College found the writings of Bacon and 
of Newton to be novel and revolutionary. Stirred by 
their teachings, he became, while still a tutor at Yale 
College, the chief influence in displacing on these 
shores the Ptolemaic conception of the universe for 
the Copernican. From Ptolemy to Darwin, then, and 
on to a world of divisible atoms and newly discovered 

19 



20 FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

forces, stupendous but hidden, whose nature we only 
partially apprehend and comprehend not at all, so far 
it is from King's College to Columbia University. 

A host of commonplaces of our modern thought were 
unknown to the generation which hailed the foundation 
of King's College. Newton had been dead but seven- 
teen years, and his doctrines were as new and as 
startling to the rest of the world as they had been to 
President Samuel Johnson. Kant, who was destined 
to give its decisive character to modern philosophy, 
was but thirty years of age, and had not yet taken his 
university degree; perhaps no one outside of Konigs- 
berg had ever heard his name. Rousseau, the connect- 
ing-link between English revolutionary theory and 
French revolutionary practice, was in middle life and 
already becoming famous. Linnaeus and Buffon were 
laying the foundations of a new natural history, but 
Lamarck, who was to reveal the modern theory of 
descent, was only a child of ten. Laplace at the ten- 
der age of five, and Lavoisier at eleven, could not yet 
be recognized as likely to make massive contributions 
to the sciences of mathematics and of chemistry. Of 
the publicists who were to guide the thought of Eng- 
lish-speaking men at a great crisis, Burke was but six 
years out of Trinity College, Dublin, and had not yet 
entered Parliament; Washington was a youth of 
twenty-two, skirmishing with the French in what was 
then the Far West; Jefferson was a boy of eleven at 
play in Virginia, and Hamilton was unborn. The new 
university at Gottingen had been opened in 1737 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 21 

with that liberty in teaching which was to build up 
the noble ideal of science as an end in itself that has 
since come to be the inspiration of every true scholar. 
But Halle and Gottingen, the first of modern univer- 
sities, were wholly unknown in America, and Oxford 
and Cambridge were anything but safe models for the 
new college of the province of New York to follow. 
Dean Swift declared that he had heard persons of 
high rank say that they could learn nothing more at 
Oxford and Cambridge than to drink ale and smoke 
tobacco. Doctor Johnson found that when at Pem- 
broke College he could attend lectures or stay away, 
as he liked, and that his gain was about the same either 
way. The poet Gray committed himself to the opinion 
that Cambridge must be the place once called Babylon, 
of which the prophet said the "wild beasts of the desert 
shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful 
creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall 
dance there"; and "the forts and towers shall be for 
dens forever, a joy of wild asses." Just at this time 
Gibbon had completed the period of residence at 
Magdalen College which he afterward described as 
the most idle and unprofitable of his whole life. These 
harsh judgments are supported by the historian of 
Oxford, Warden Brodrick, who says explicitly that at 
this period the nation had lost confidence in Oxford 
education. 

It was into a world of knowledge and thought to- 
tally different from ours that King's College was born 
a century and a half ago. 



22 FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

These provinces were remote in those days, and their 
settlers were chiefly bent upon material development 
and upbuilding. For the journey across the Atlantic 
to consume from four to six weeks was not unusual. 
Learning was of necessity at a low ebb, for the schol- 
arly men who were among the first settlers had passed 
away, and their children and grandchildren, born in 
the colonies and reared there, had not much chance 
for a broad or a prolonged education. Harvard Col- 
lege had been in existence for a century and a quarter, 
and Yale for half a century, but both were hard pressed 
for means of subsistence, and their intellectual outlook 
was a contracted one. Jonathan Edwards had written, 
a few years earlier, that he took "very great content" 
from his instruction at Yale, and that the rest of the 
scholars did likewise. The College of New Jersey had 
recently begun instruction at Elizabeth town, and just 
as King's College opened its doors ground was break- 
ing at Princeton for the first building of its permanent 
horne. In Philadelphia Franklin was urging on the 
movement that was soon to give a college to that 
prosperous city, and throughout the colonies generally 
the need for a higher type of education was felt and 
efforts were making to supply it. 

Then, as now, New York was often described as a 
city given over to trade and commerce to the neglect 
of higher and better things, but there is evidence that 
while the citizens were gaining the material substance 
with which to support a college, they were not neg- 
lectful of the fact that a college was sorely needed 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 23 

among them. For fully fifty years the idea of a col- 
lege for the province of New York had been mooted, 
and general sentiment was favorable to it; but it was 
not until 1746 that the first step was taken to bring 
about the desired end. On December 6 of that year 
the legislature of the colony passed an act authorizing 
the raising of the sum of £250 by public lottery "for 
the advancement of learning and towards the found- 
ing of a college." The preamble of this act clearly 
shows that there was a wide-spread conviction that 
the welfare and reputation of the colony would be pro- 
moted by laying a proper and ample foundation for 
the regular education of youth. Other similar acts 
followed, and by 1752 nearly £3,500 had been raised 
by lottery for erecting a college. We smile now at the 
thought of supporting education through lotteries, but 
the practice was quite common in those days. In- 
deed, the lottery, which appears to have been a Floren- 
tine invention of some two hundred years earlier, had 
been invoked by Parliament the very year before that 
in which the charter of King's College was granted, in 
order to endow the British Museum. To purchase the 
Sloane collection, the Harleian manuscripts, and the 
Cottonian library, which collections formed the be- 
ginning of the British Museum, and to put the new 
institution upon its feet, the sum of £300,000 was au- 
thorized to be raised by public lottery. 

The sum of £3,500, or thereabouts, raised by lottery 
for the college, was vested in trustees who were em- 
powered to manage it, to accept additional contribu- 



24 FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

tions, and receive proposals from any city or county 
within the colony desirous of having the college erected 
therein. On May 20, 1754, these trustees, through 
William Livingston, one of their number, petitioned 
the lieutenant-governor, James De Lancey — the un- 
happy Governor Osborn having taken his own life, 
and no successor being yet appointed — to grant a 
charter of incorporation, either to them or to such other 
trustees as might be chosen, "the better to enable 
them to prosecute the said design of establishing a 
seminary or college for the instruction of youth. " 
This petition also recited the fact that additional sup- 
port had been found for the proposed college, in that 
"the Rector and inhabitants of the City of New York, 
in communion with the Church of England, as by law 
established, being willing to encourage the said good 
design of establishing a seminary or college for the 
education of youth in the liberal arts or sciences, have 
offered unto your petitioners a very valuable parcel 
of ground on the west side of Broadway, in the west 
ward of the City of New York, for the use of the said 
intended seminary or college, and are ready and de- 
sirous to convey the said lands for the said use, on 
condition that the head or master of the said seminary 
or college be a member of and in communion with the 
Church of England as by law established, and that the 
liturgy, of the said church, or a collection of prayers 
out of the said liturgy, be the constant morning and 
evening service used in the said college forever." The 
petitioners obviously favored the acceptance of the 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 25 

conditions attached to the proposed grant, for they 
went on to say that they considered the site proposed 
to be "the most proper place for erecting the said 
seminary or college." This ground was part of the 
well-known King's Farm, which had evidently long 
been in mind as the site of the college of the province. 
For as early as 1703 the vestry of Trinity Church, 
before putting the farm out on lease, appointed the 
rector and churchwardens to wait upon Lord Corn- 
bury, then governor, in order to learn what part of 
the farm he designed to use for the college which he 
(Cornbury) planned. It was March 5, 1752, when the 
vestry made the formal proposal to the commissioners 
appointed to receive proposals for the building of a 
college, and thereafter matters progressed speedily. 

On October 31, 1754, James De Lancey, lieutenant- 
governor and commander-in-chief of the province of 
New York, signed the charter and attached thereto 
the great seal of the province. King's College "for 
the instruction and education of youth in the learned 
languages and liberal arts and sciences" was legally 
born. It is that act which we joyfully celebrate to-day. 

It would not be profitable now to dwell upon the 
long and heated controversy that accompanied the 
foundation of the college. The seeds of the coming 
Revolution had already been sown, and in matters 
civil and ecclesiastical there were sharp differences of 
opinion among the colonists. On one hand it was felt 
that the conditions attached to the grant of land from 
Trinity Church were an unwarranted attempt to make 



26 FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

the new college of the province a sectarian institu- 
tion, and that the charter should have come from the 
assembly rather than from the king. In reply it was 
urged that no conditions were thought of by Trinity 
Church until ground had been given for the belief 
that there was an intention to erect a college that 
should have no religious associations whatever; and 
that then only those conditions were imposed which, 
liberally interpreted, would assure to the college a 
Christian, but by no means a sectarian, relationship 
and influence. The history of the college fully bears 
out this view. As to the origin of the charter, it may 
well be that the trustees of the original fund raised by 
lottery, subsequently increased by a grant from the 
excise moneys, were moved to petition the lieutenant- 
governor rather than the assembly for a charter, 
just because of the acrimony of the existing contro- 
versy and the fear of its results. However this may 
be, the charter itself is a striking paper and one that 
represents a point of view and a liberality of mind far 
in advance of its time. 

The charter makes express mention of the fact that 
the college is founded not alone for the inhabitants of 
the province of New York, but for those of all the 
colonies and territories in America as well. Here, in 
foresight and in prophecy, is the national university 
that Columbia has since become. The charter as- 
sumes a public responsibility for the new college by 
naming as trustees, ex-officiis, a number of representa- 
tive public officials. Here, in foresight and in prophecy, 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 27 

is the close relationship between the city and the col- 
lege which has existed from that day to this, the more 
helpful in recent times because unofficial. The 
charter assures the liberality of the college in matters 
ecclesiastical and religious by designating as trustees, 
ex-ojficiis, the rector of Trinity Church, the senior 
minister of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, 
the minister of the ancient Lutheran Church, the 
minister of the French Church, and the minister of the 
Presbyterian congregation. The very next year the 
governors of the college united in a petition, which 
was granted, asking for power to establish a chair of 
divinity, the right to nomination for which should lie 
in the minister, elders, and deacons of the Reformed 
Protestant Dutch Church of the city. Here, in fore- 
sight and in prophecy, is that respect and regard for 
the Christian religion, and that catholicity of temper 
and tolerance of mind, which mark Columbia Univer- 
sity of this later day. The charter expressly provides 
that no law or statute shall be made by the trustees 
which tends to exclude any person of any religious de- 
nomination whatever from equal liberty and advantage 
of education, or from any of the degrees, liberties, 
privileges, benefits, or immunities of the college on 
account of his particular tenets in matters of religion. 
Here, in foresight and in prophecy, is this splendid 
company of scholars and of students in which every 
part of the civilized world and every variety of re- 
ligious faith are represented, all without prejudice. 
This was a notable charter to be granted at a time 



28 FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

of bitter religious controversy and prevailing narrow- 
ness of vision, and the steps taken under it were worthy 
of its far-reaching provisions. The presidency was 
tendered to Samuel Johnson, one of the most remark- 
able men of his time; and it was he who gave to the 
new college its educational form, its controlling ten- 
dencies, and its first ideals. Open-minded and catholic, 
Doctor Johnson was the most scholarly American of 
the period, and with Jonathan Edwards he takes rank 
as one of the two really powerful and constructive 
American philosophers of the eighteenth century. 
Benjamin Franklin, who had been his publisher, con- 
sulted with him as to the plans for the projected col- 
lege at Philadelphia, and urged him to become its head. 
But Johnson was more strongly drawn toward New 
York, in whose projects for a college he had long been 
an interested counsellor, and for which his friend and 
philosophical preceptor, Bishop Berkeley, had fed the 
flame of his enthusiasm. 

Doctor Johnson, sole lecturer, began instruction in 
the month of July, 1754, some time before the charter 
was granted, in the vestry-room of the schoolhouse 
adjoining Trinity Church, of which the temporary use 
had been allowed him. The requirements for admis- 
sion to his first class were simple: the first five rules in 
arithmetic, a knowledge of the Latin and Greek gram- 
mars, and an ability to write grammatical Latin; 
ability to read Cicero and the first books of the iEneid, 
and some of the first chapters of the Gospel of St. 
John in Greek. A warning was at the same time given 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 29 

that higher qualifications would soon be exacted. 
Considering the state of opinion and the practice else- 
where, this declaration by President Johnson is remark- 
able: "That people may be better satisfied in sending 
their children for education to this college, it is to be 
understood that, as to religion, there is no intention 
to impose upon the scholars the peculiar tenets of any 
particular set of Christians, but to inculcate upon 
their tender minds the great principles of Christianity 
and morality in which true Christians of each de- 
nomination are generally agreed." So broad a toler- 
ance as this is more usually associated with the end 
of the nineteenth century than with the middle of the 
eighteenth. 

Moreover, this first president had a distinct vision 
of what was to follow from his small and modest be- 
ginnings; for he pictured the future in these words: 
"It is further the design of this College to instruct 
and perfect youth in the learned languages, and in the 
arts of reasoning exactly, of writing correctly and 
speaking eloquently, and in the arts of numbering and 
measuring, of surveying and navigation, of geography 
and history, of husbandry, commerce and government; 
and in the knowledge of all nature in the heavens above 
us, and in the air, water and earth around us, and in 
the various kinds of meteors, stones, mines and min- 
erals, plants and animals, and of everything useful 
for the comfort, the convenience and the elegance of 
life in the chief manufactures; finally to lead them 
from the study of nature to the knowledge of them- 



30 FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

selves, and of the God of nature, their duty to him, 
themselves and one another." The felicity of phrase 
in this proclamation is not more remarkable than the 
clear recognition of the part to be played in education 
by the sciences of nature and their applications. Here 
spoke the mind stirred by the reading of Bacon and 
Newton, of Locke and Berkeley. The new science and 
the new philosophy were bearing their first-fruits here 
on this island, remote from the capitals of the world's 
affairs and far distant from the historic seats of the 
older learning. 

On July 17 President Johnson, sole instructor, met 
his group of eight students. Bayard, Bloomer, Van 
Cortlandt, Cruger, Marston, Provoost, Ritzema, and 
Verplanck were the families represented on those 
slender benches. Good names all, some of them bearers 
of the sturdiest traditions of our city. Others fol- 
lowed, and it was not many years before the college 
roll was rich with the best names of old New York. 
There were Auchmuty, Barclay, Beekman, Bogert, 
Cutting, De Lancey, De Peyster, Griswold, Hoffman, 
Jay, Lispenard, Livingston, Morris, Nicholl, Pell, 
Philipse, Remsen, Romeyn, Roosevelt, Rutgers, Schuy- 
ler, Stevens, Townsend, Van Buren, and Watt — names 
which for generations have been in close and honorable 
association with the commerce, the society, and the 
politics of New York. Mr. Henry Adams is authority 
for the statements that before 1800 New York excelled 
New England in scientific work accomplished, and that 
New York was always an innovating influence. Study 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 31 

of the early history of our college and comparison of 
its professed aims and its outlook with those of the 
older institutions to the east and to the south justify 
his conclusions. And, slow as its development was in 
many ways, the history of Columbia College proves 
conclusively that it had always been an innovator and 
a leader. Its wise and far-sighted policies, more or less 
clearly formulated in detail, were for generations held 
back from execution only by lack of means. From 
the very beginning, though often with stumblings and 
delay, Columbia has trod the 

" Path to a clear-purposed goal, 
Path of advance I" 

Our earlier teachers, like our later ones, were chosen 
for scholarship and character, wherever they were to 
be found. William Johnson, first tutor, came, as did 
his father, the president, from Yale. Leonard Cutting, 
who followed, was educated at Eton and Cambridge. 
Daniel Treadwell, first professor of mathematics, came, 
in 1757, from Harvard, and his successor, Harpur, 
from Glasgow. Myles Cooper was trained at Queen's 
College, Oxford, and Clossy, whose chair included the 
whole of natural science, at Trinity College, Dublin. 
Different view-points and varied associations helped 
make this company of early teachers cosmopolitan 
and open-minded. 

The list of twelve presidents is unique in more than 
one respect. The two Johnsons and Barnard were 
graduates of Yale; Cooper came from Oxford; Wharton 



32 FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

was trained at the English Jesuits' College of St. 
Omer, and was ordained a priest of the Roman Cath- 
olic Church; the first Moore held his degree from 
King's College, the second Moore and his two suc- 
cessors, now living, had theirs from Columbia; Harris 
was educated at Harvard; Duer at Winchester in the 
mother country and at Erasmus Hall on Long Island, 
and King at Harrow and Paris. The younger Johnson, 
who came to the presidency in 1787, was a layman, 
the first lay head of a college among English-speaking 
people of whom I find record; Duer, the second Moore, 
and King were also laymen, as was Barnard to all in- 
tents and purposes (though he took orders as an aid 
to his work in education and with no intention of en- 
gaging in parochial work), and as are the two presi- 
dents now living. Only Harris and Barnard died in 
office. The second Johnson and Duer were lawyers; 
the second Moore divided his energies between law 
and teaching; King was a merchant and editor, and 
Barnard was an educator in the fullest and highest 
sense of the word. Columbia, it will be. seen, broke 
early with existing traditions, and the progressiveness 
and catholicity shown alike by the governing board 
and the teaching body were reflected in movements 
for educational advance that are as noteworthy as 
some of them are now seen to have been premature. 
The early and vigorous attention to the natural 
sciences under the lead of Ciossy, Bard, Mitchill, and 
Hosack, the deep interest in public afFairs and partici- 
pation in them, which took the second Johnson to the 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 33 

Constitutional Convention and then to the Senate of 
the United States, while still president, and Professor 
Mitchill to the legislature, to the House of Represen- 
tatives, and to the Senate; the solicitous care for public 
education which spurred on De Witt Clinton, Henry 
Rutgers, and Peter A. Jay to lead the work of the Public 
School Society of the city of New York and so pave 
the way for the present municipal school system, were 
all prophetic of that zeal for scientific advance, for the 
public service, and for the education of the people 
which so strongly mark the Columbia of to-day. 

Given so large a company of progressive men of 
science and of afFairs, so noble a society of scholars, 
and so commanding a situation in this rapidly develop- 
ing city, was not Columbia College unduly slow in 
reaching the plane of excellence and the wide scope of 
activity which were marked out for it from the very 
beginning ? It certainly was, and the cause was grind- 
ing poverty. 

The trustees of half a century ago had been facing 
problems which might well have staggered the bravest 
of them. It is more than twenty years since President 
Barnard, whose eager and far-sighted plans for Co- 
lumbia were hemmed in on every side by lack of funds 
with which to carry them out, reviewed the financial 
history of the corporation and made it plain what the 
source of embarrassment and delay had been. 

It is literally true that for a full century the college 
had to struggle for its life. The amount raised by 
lottery, increased somewhat by small legislative grants, 



34 FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

appears to have been spent upon the first building and 
in the purchase of those materials that were neces- 
sary to the institution's work. The portion of the 
King's Farm granted by Trinity Church was valued 
at £4,000 or £5,000, but it lay beyond the limits of the 
inhabited portion of the island, and was for many 
years unproductive. It did, however, afford a com- 
modious and convenient home for the college. The 
need for additional resources was early felt, and the 
royal governor of the province was appealed to for a 
grant of public land to the trustees. In response, a 
large tract of 24,000 acres, "comprising the township 
of Kingsland, in the County of Gloucester, in the 
Province of New York," was conveyed to the trustees 
by letters patent in 1770. Subsequently, however, in 
the settlement of the disputed boundary between 
New York and New Hampshire, this land, as well as 
30,000 acres granted, in 1774, DV Governor Try on, 
was found to belong to what is now the State of Ver- 
mont, and it passed from the trustees without com- 
pensation. Gifts were few and small for many years, 
for the troubled times in the colonies were naturally 
not favorable to endowments for learning. Occasional 
legislative grants of small sums were rather an evidence 
of public interest in the college than serious attempts 
to upbuild it. Finally, in 18 14, came the action which, 
through the courage and far-sightedness of the trus- 
tees, has meant so much to us. Upon a petition of the 
trustees setting forth that the extensive lands granted 
by earlier governors had been lost to the college, 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 35 

without compensation, in the settlement of the bound- 
ary dispute, the legislature granted to the college the 
so-called Hosack Botanic Garden, comprising the land 
in the city of New York now bounded by Fifth Ave- 
nue on the east, by Forty-seventh Street on the south, 
by Fifty-first Street on the north, and by a line dis- 
tant about 100 feet from the easterly line of Sixth Ave- 
nue on the west, 260 city lots in all, then valued at 
#75,000. David Hosack, whose name this property 
bore and who had conveyed it to the State for a bo- 
tanic garden, had been professor of botany in Columbia 
College from 1795 to 181 1, and was a man of marked 
distinction in his day. 

Therefore, the two historic endowments of the 
college which in these later days have become, through 
the growth and prosperity of the city, the main sup- 
port of its rapidly expanding work, are gifts, the one 
from the church and the other from the state, to the 
upbuilding and defense of both of which the college 
has bent its every energy from the day of its founda- 
tion. In the King's Farm, or lower estate, and in the 
Hosack Botanic Garden, or upper estate, Columbia 
now holds tangible evidence of what religion and civil 
government have done for learning in this commu- 
nity, and it gratefully acknowledges its heavy obliga- 
tion to them both. 

But, splendid as the future of these properties was 
to be, they were not a source of immediate income. 
Quite the contrary; the cost of holding the property 
and of meeting the public charges upon it was an al- 



$6 FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

most intolerable burden. In 1805 the income from the 
portion of the lower estate under lease was only about 
$1,400. Deficits faced the trustees with the closing of 
each annual account. Still they struggled on, having 
firm and clear faith in the future of the city and in the 
triumph of the high ideals committed to their keeping. 
The strong men who fought the fight during the long 
period of discouragement from 18 10 to 1870 — Rufus 
King and David B. Ogden, William Johnson and 
Beverly Robinson, Philip Hone and Samuel B. Rug- 
gles, William Betts and Hamilton Fish, and their as- 
sociates — they are those who saved this university for 
the twentieth century. It was 1863 before the slowly 
increasing income was sufficient to meet the cost of 
annual maintenance, and it was 1872 before the ac- 
cumulated debt was wiped out. From that time begins 
a new chapter in the financial history of the corpora- 
tion, a chapter which extends to the removal to the 
new home on Morningside Heights with its rapidly 
crowding opportunities and its heavy attendant re- 
sponsibilities. It is plain, therefore, that the bare 
struggle for existence postponed almost to our own 
day that widening of influence and of scope, and that 
increase of activity, which had been part of the plan 
of the college from its earliest days. 

"Debt," wrote President Barnard truly, "is no 
doubt a great evil, but there are evils worse than debt, 
and among these is stagnation." Columbia long bore 
the burden of debt and chafed in its heavy chains, but 
it is not true that it has ever been stagnant. At no 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 37 

time has it been without men whose scholarship and 
whose patriotic service in moulding the institutions and 
the public opinion of our young democracy, put them 
in the front rank of a university's heroes. The first 
Johnson was easily the most scholarly man in the 
colonies, and in philosophy a vigorous and progressive 
mind. The erudite Bard had no superior as a physician, 
and is gratefully remembered as sounding the call 
which brought into existence the Society of the New 
York Hospital. The second Johnson was fit com- 
panion to the noble company with whom he sat in the 
Constitutional Convention; it was he who proposed 
that the States should be equally represented, as States, 
in the Senate of the United States, and who, as chair- 
man of the committee appointed to revise the style of 
the Constitution and arrange its articles, did much to 
give that instrument its familiar and admired form. 
With him in that noteworthy committee of five sat 
Alexander Hamilton of the Class of 1774 and Gouver- 
neur Morris of the Class of 1768. Later, as senator 
from Connecticut while still president of the college, 
Johnson was a chief agent in framing the bill to or- 
ganize the judiciary of the United States. Our own 
Hewitt has pointed out that it was De Witt Clinton, 
of 1786, who created the Erie Canal by which the 
wealth of the great West was opened up and poured 
into the lap of New York; that it was Robert R. Liv- 
ingston, of 1765, who recognized the genius of Fulton 
and supplied the means to make steam navigation a 
success, and that it was John Stevens, of 1768, who 



38 FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

gave us the railway and the screw propeller, revolution- 
izing transportation by land and sea. But for Living- 
ston there would doubtless have been no Louisiana 
Purchase, and our nation's history might have been 
strangely different; and it was Mitchill who in the 
legislative branch gave effective support to Jefferson's 
plan to send Lewis and Clark across the undiscovered 
mountains and to open for settlement the noble lands 
"where rolls the Oregon." Kent, fit successor of 
Bracton, Littleton, and Coke, not only taught stu- 
dents, but trained the public mind to an appreciation 
of the fundamental concepts of American law. Mitch- 
ill, in his chair of natural history and chemistry, 
was a fellow investigator with Lavoisier and Priestley, 
and passing to the House of Representatives and to 
the Senate, he was as serviceable to the state as to 
science. Hosack was an influential figure in the early 
development of botanical and medical science. Adrain, 
a prince among mathematicians, preceded Gauss, 
Laplace, and Herschel in his research concerning the 
probabilities of error which happen in making obser- 
vations. McVickar, versatile and powerful, was one 
of the earliest American economists, the incumbent at 
Columbia of the first chair of political economy of the 
United States, and may fairly be claimed as the for- 
mulator of the principles upon which our national 
banking system rests. To Anderson and Davies mathe- 
matical teaching in America owes a debt which it is 
glad to acknowledge, and it was Davies who, by his 
text-books, familiarized American teachers and stu- 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 39 

dents with the methods of exposition and study that 
had gained ground so largely in France. Anthon's 
copious stores of learning were freely drawn upon for 
the benefit of students of the Greek and Latin classics, 
and it was he who first made known in America the 
results of the vast researches chiefly by German 
scholars in the fields of classical history, philology, and 
archaeology. Lieber's commanding figure and pro- 
found learning gave added weight to his luminous ex- 
position of the philosophy of history. All these great 
men lived and served in the day of small things, and 
they have left splendid traditions and fortunate mem- 
ories behind them. Not once in the long years of 
darkness and doubt, of difficulty and discouragement, 
was the college without commanding personalities 
among its governors and its teachers, or without 
worthy youths training for distinction on its scholars' 
benches. 

From the day of its foundation our college was 
marked to become a great university. It had from its 
earliest beginnings no small or restricted conception of 
its mighty mission. It hailed its home in New York 
as a vantage-seat from which to influence the nation 
that lay behind and beyond. It was filled with plans 
for expansion and development that must have seemed 
strange enough to those who were content to plod 
along in the well-trodden path of the traditional col- 
lege education of the day. From Doctor Johnson's 
first advertisement in 1754 to the academic legislation 
of most recent years, Columbia has had a university's 



4 o FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

ideals in view and has struggled earnestly toward their 
realization. 

Instruction in divinity was planned as early as 1755, 
that in medicine was begun in 1763, and that in law 
in 1773. After the Revolution, when the name Colum- 
bia supplanted that of King's, the governors immedi- 
ately voted to establish the four familiar university 
faculties of arts, medicine, law, and divinity. Hardly 
a decade has passed from that time to this when some 
ambitious spirit, either in the governing board or in 
the faculties, has not urged projects of expansion and 
advance. Most remarkable is the extraordinary scheme 
for a charter establishing "the American university in 
the province of New York," which was drafted at the 
express command of the governors of King's College, 
and which met with their formal approval on August 
4, 1774. It contemplated a great institution composed 
of many parts, after the fashion of the French uni- 
versity organization completed by Napoleon. It was 
to confer any degree, and presumably, therefore, to 
give any instruction, given by any or all of the uni- 
versities in England or Ireland. Read in the light of 
its date, the conception was an astounding one. This 
draft was transmitted to England and by command of 
the king was laid before him in council in April, 
1775. With the record of that act the history of this 
remarkable document ends. Already the guns of Lex- 
ington and Concord were loading, and the urgent 
voices calling for the royal approval of the charter 
were drowned by the roar of the shot heard round the 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 41 

world. It may be permitted, however, to point out 
that no company of men given over solely to the pur- 
suit of material well-being and the sordid accumulation 
of wealth could ever have entertained with sympathy 
and approval the noble conception of a great national 
university which that document revealed. 

There are no worthier names upon our college roll 
than those of the men who from time to time urged 
projects of advancement and a wider growth. The 
report of 1784 was presented by a committee on which 
sat James Duane and Alexander Hamilton, John H. 
Livingston and Samuel Provoost, Nicholas Romaine 
and Morgan Lewis. The memorial of 18 10 addressed 
to the legislature was drafted by Doctor Mason and 
urges that the trustees had been for some time "sedu- 
lously occupied in giving to the whole system of the 
college that improvement of which they are persuaded 
it is capable, and which when completed will elevate 
it to a rank that shall subserve the prosperity and re- 
dound to the honor of the State." This appeal was 
itself the result of a movement which had been begun 
two years earlier by the appointment of a committee of 
the strongest men on the board "to express their opin- 
ion generally as to the measures proper for carrying 
into full effect the design of this institution/' Again 
in 1830 a far-reaching plan of expansion was adopted. 
When reported to the trustees it bore the signatures of 
Bishop Hob art, of Doctor Wainwright, of Doctor On- 
derdonk, of Doctor William Johnson, of John T. Irving, 
of Clement C, Moore, and of Charles King. 



42 FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

Once more, in 1852, at the instance of President 
King, another movement was begun to develop a uni- 
versity upon the foundation afforded by the old col- 
lege. Long consideration was given to the ways and 
means to be adopted, and finally, in 1858, the elabo- 
rate plans that had been evolved were formally ap- 
proved. William Betts, Henry James Anderson, 
Hamilton Fish, and Samuel B. Ruggles were those 
most largely concerned in their formulation. From 
that auspicious movement dates the beginning of the 
modern history of Columbia. No year has passed 
since the reports of 1854, 1857, and 1858 were sub- 
mitted without some step forward being either planned 
or taken. It was under the impulse of this movement 
that the first university lectures were delivered; that 
the School of Law was definitely organized; that the 
College of Physicians and Surgeons was brought back 
to the university to occupy the traditional place of 
medicine therein, and that the School of Mines came 
into being to lead the way in this country in teaching 
the applications of modern science to a group of its 
great industries. 

With the accession to the presidency of Barnard in 
1864, there came to the service of the university one 
of the greatest figures, in many ways the greatest fig- 
ure, in the whole history of our American education. 
His active and restless mind, which grew neither old 
nor tired, planned unceasingly and saw with astound- 
ing clearness of vision. Barnard is the greatest pro- 
phetic figure in the history of modern education. He 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 43 

first saw that the traditional college course was no 
longer adequate to meet the needs of modern youth; 
that it must be supplemented, extended, readjusted, 
and made more elastic, if it would serve under new 
conditions the same ends that it had served so well in 
the past. He exalted science and scientific research 
to their place of honor, and he swept with his keen 
vision the whole field of education and called upon the 
university to enter upon it as a subject of study and to 
treat teaching as a serious profession and not merely 
as an occupation. He gave his powerful influence to 
the movement for the opening of educational oppor- 
tunities to women, and he felt keenly the limitations 
under which they suffered in his day. He looked out 
into new fields of inquiry and saw the significance of 
those studies in language, in archaeology, in history 
and political science, in the physical and mathematical 
sciences, in experimental medicine, and in the science 
of life that are now gladly included in the wide circle 
of our university's care. What this generation has 
done Barnard planned and urged. Much of what re- 
mains for the next generation to accomplish he fore- 
saw and exhibited. 

One may be permitted to doubt whether, in the whole 
history of higher institutions of learning, there is an- 
other example of so consistent and steadfast pursuit 
of an ideal end as is shown in the history of the de- 
velopment from King's College to Columbia Univer- 
sity. Broad scholarship, catholic sympathies, the 
widest scope, all have marked every plan proposed for 



44 FROM KING'S COLLEGE 

adoption by the governing board. Even when it 
seemed impossible to sustain the academic life, men 
were planning not only to sustain it, but to enlarge 
and enrich it. Faith in this city and in this nation, 
faith in science and in philosophy, faith in public ser- 
vice and in lofty ideals has been the very life-blood of 
our college and university for the whole century and 
a half that has gone. 

Twice in our history the pursuing city has driven us 
from our home. The King's Farm seemed far away 
from the centre of the small town of 1754. The Madi- 
son Avenue grounds were indisputably distant even 
from the resident section of 1857. But so rapid have 
been the strides of this metropolitan community that 
nothing less than the island's crown could suffice for 
Columbia's permanent need. Here, on soil where 
patriot strove and where nature reveals her beauty of 
rock and hill and stream, our university has made its 
permanent home with face bent upon a historic past, 
but eagerly expecting a historic future as well. No 
more will it seek to avoid a city's embrace, but set 
upon a hill where its light cannot be hid, it will be to 
the city as its very mind and soul. Commerce and 
finance will bring to New York physical strength and 
material wealth and hold high the symbols of com- 
mercial integrity. Transportation by land and sea and 
air will bring the travellers of the earth to our doors 
and seekers after knowledge from its remotest parts to 
these academic halls. The temples of religion will 
testify to our belief in God and his worship, and the 



TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 45 

institutions of philanthropy to man's succoring hand 
stretched out to his unfortunate fellow. Above, 
among, and about them will be the influence of our 
university, preserving those things that should be pre- 
served, discarding those things that are found to be 
no longer true, and pursuing those things that are of 
good report. To this height shall come those impulses 
of need which the city sends to call out our responding 
service. From this height shall go out those noble in- 
fluences that will justify the struggles of the fathers 
and the ample plans of those who have gone before. 
Here in quiet and yet in activity, apart from the city 
and yet in it, shall be the home of that grateful growth 
from the early seed, a city's mind and a city's soul. 



Ill 

THE UNIVERSITY AND THE CITY 



From the Annual Report as president of Columbia University, 

October 6, 1902 



/ 
THE UNIVERSITY AND THE CITY 

The whole form of modern university development 
has been conditioned by the growth of great cities. 
The life of the modern universities is becoming more 
and more of the urban type. Each of the world's great 
capitals which is or aims to be a centre of influence in 
the largest sense of the word must and will be the 
home of a great university. That university will be 
national, or even international, in sympathy, scope, 
and influence. But it will be dependent in a large 
measure — when not, as in Europe, a governmental in- 
stitution — upon the support of the city in which it is. 

This university will of necessity reflect and extend 
the spirit and temper of that city. The drift of popu- 
lation into the great city centres is paralleled by the 
rapid growth of the number of students attending the 
city universities. While there is a difference of opinion 
as to the desirability of a city as a place of purely col- 
legiate or undergraduate instruction, there is no 
doubt whatever as to the superiority of the city's op- 
portunities and environment as a place of graduate, 
professional, and technical study. The history of 
Columbia College, which is the oldest part of Colum- 
bia University, and in a sense the mother of all the 
rest, shows clearly that during the past ten years at 
any rate an increasing number of parents in every part 

49 



50 THE UNIVERSITY AND THE CITY 

of the country are choosing New York and Columbia 
as a place to which to send their sons, even for the un- 
dergraduate period of study. 

The reason for the vast and rapid development of 
the urban university is, as Cardinal Newman said two 
generations ago, that a city is by its very nature a uni- 
versity. It draws to itself men and women of all types 
and kinds, it is the home of great collections of art and 
science, and it affords abundant opportunities to come 
under the influence of the best music and the best 
literature of our time. 

The great city, and especially New York, is intensely 
cosmopolitan, and contact with its life for a short time 
during the impressionableness of youth is in itself a 
liberal education. Columbia is the typical urban uni- 
versity, and in a sense the most national of all Amer- 
ican institutions of higher learning. It typifies the 
earnestness, the strenuousness, the practicality, and the 
catholicity of New York City, and its constituency is 
drawn from every part of the nation. The tendency 
of American institutions once local to become truly 
national is a striking characteristic of the changes of 
the past quarter of a century. Perhaps no other Amer- 
ican university has profited more than Columbia by 
the change, and perhaps none has done more to bring 
it about. 

The universities at Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Munich, 
and New York owe their leadership to the fact that 
they are intent upon research and the training of pro- 
ductive scholars on the one hand, and upon the de- 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE CITY 51 

velopment and support of the highest possible pro- 
fessional training on the other. Each of these insti- 
tutions is proud of the fact that its faculty includes a 
number of the unquestioned leaders in the world's 
science and the world's literature. It is the presence 
of men like these that constitutes a real university. 
And it is upon their influence and example that the 
university depends for its present and future useful- 
ness. 

The problems before Columbia University at the 
moment are twofold. The first is the problem which 
it has in common with all urban universities, namely, 
that of promoting productive scholarship and teaching 
efficiency. The second is the problem peculiar to a 
university which is situated in New York and which 
is, and aims to be, representative of all that is best in 
the traditions and ambitions of the American metrop- 
olis. This latter problem is, in fact, that of practical 
usefulness to the community and of effective leader- 
ship in all that concerns good citizenship and the high- 
est personal and civic ideas. Columbia aims to keep 
always in close touch with the community of which it 
is so important a part. Its needs are enormous, but 
the capacity of New York to meet them is even greater; 
and we rely with confidence primarily upon the gen- 
erous support and sympathy of the great city. 



IV 
THE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 



Address at the dedication of the State Education Building at 
Albany, New York, October 16, 191 2 



THE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 

Mr. Chancellor, Regents, Mr. Commissioner, Ladies 
and Gentlemen : 

The occasion that has brought together this dis- 
tinguished and representative assemblage is no or- 
dinary one. It has called from his post of duty across 
the sea the American ambassador to Great Britain in 
order that he may fill his distinguished place as chan- 
cellor of the University of the State of New York. It 
has summoned here representatives of public life, of 
education, and of institutions of learning from every 
part of our land, and from other lands as well; and it 
has called forth those messages of congratulation such 
as the commissioner has just read from the very edge 
of the world's latest war and from the capital city of 
one of the world's most heavily oppressed peoples. 

It is an extraordinary occasion, and it is not to be 
passed by with a mere word of description of this great 
building, however noble, however magnificent, how- 
ever monumental; because this building which we are 
here to dedicate to its high purpose in the presence of 
representatives of education of every form and type 
is itself the result of more than a century and a quarter 
of purposeful history. It puts into marble and stone 
and steel the visible embodiment of a great ideal. 

The constructive spirit of Alexander Hamilton broods 
over this place. Whether or not Hamilton was him- 

55 



56 THE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 

self the first to conceive of an American state system of 
education in which every educational interest and 
every type and form of instruction was to be included, 
makes very little difference. Whether Hamilton him- 
self worked out the plan for the New York system of 
education, or whether he only aided and guided others 
in working it out, is a matter of no great present im- 
portance. Hamilton's philosophic insight, his broad 
vision, his practical capacity, are all represented and 
reflected in what this great building stands for and 
celebrates. That the framework of the educational 
system of the State of New York embodies the result 
of the conflicting views, political and social, of Alex- 
ander Hamilton and of George Clinton, we know. 
That the life history of that system bears in the fullest 
measure the evidence of Hamilton's genius and of 
Hamilton's intellectual vitality, is a matter of undis- 
puted record and should be recalled on this day and in 
this presence. 

The seed thought which underlies and gives purpose 
to the whole educational policy of New York from its 
very beginning — when it was a colony, when it was a 
province, and later when it became a State — is that 
the educational process is a unit and that its super- 
vision and control should be gathered into one single 
department of state education. Rivalries, misunder- 
standings, personal interests, and ambitions long re- 
tarded the complete fulfilment of this fine aim. From 
the time of the first establishment in 1812 of the 
office of State Superintendent of Public Instruction 



THE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 57 

until the enactment nearly ninety years later of the 
admirable law which is now in force and under which 
we live, the complete unification of the educational 
administration of the State proved to be impossible. 
That unification has now been wholly achieved. This 
building is its revelation and its embodiment. It has 
been achieved to the very great satisfaction, I feel 
sure, of every student of education and of the en- 
lightened citizenship of the State. It is an achieve- 
ment for New York; it is an example for our sister 
States. 

This evidence of practical sagacity reflects and ex- 
emplifies a profound philosophic truth. The moment 
that we think straight about education and free our- 
selves from cant, from phrase-making, and from for- 
mulas, we know that intellectual and moral growth is 
an undivided process. We know that it cannot be 
divided into water-tight compartments, any one of 
which may be filled with ignorance while the human 
being affected still floats on the sea of intelligence. 
We know that it cannot be cut up into fragments at 
war among themselves, with some one fragment tak- 
ing precedence over others. We know that every 
educational institution has a common purpose and a 
common end, and that to attempt to set one against 
the other, to bring about conflict and rivalry and jeal- 
ousy between them, is to incite educational civil war. 
The division of education into stages, the classification 
of educational institutions into types, is a mere matter 
of administrative convenience, a simple administra- 



58 THE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 

tive device with nothing to justify it but our adminis- 
trative convenience and necessity. If any one sup- 
poses that this device rests upon some profound prin- 
ciple that fixes a gulf between one stage or grade of 
education and another, and that compels these stages 
to have different and disputing interests, then in my 
judgment that person is absolutely wrong. It is a 
constant struggle in all of our educational adminis- 
tration to keep these administrative conveniences in 
the subordinate place where they belong. We are al- 
ways to have a great and serious care that our adminis- 
trative devices are not erected into shibboleths and 
so made the means of cramping, narrowing, or crush- 
ing the life history of even a single human soul. 

The point of this remark lies, as an American humor- 
ist has said, in the application of it. That application 
is this: The process which this building symbolizes, 
the process to aid and guide which the school, the col- 
lege, and the university are founded, is one that would 
go on in some fashion if schools and colleges and uni- 
versities had never been heard of. These institutions 
do not create education, although they sometimes con- 
spire to make it extremely difficult. When one re- 
flects upon the ravages which have been committed 
in the name of education and upon the assaults on our 
intelligence which have been made by educated men, 
he sees the point of view of the cynic who would urge 
us to agitate for compulsory illiteracy ! He is dis- 
posed to paraphrase the dying words of Madame Ro- 
land, and to cry out: "Oh, education, what crimes are 



TEE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 59 

committed in thy name!" All of which means that 
our supreme care in reflecting upon this great public 
interest must be to keep it natural, to keep it true, to 
keep it free from contamination alike by false and low 
ideals and by mere mechanical devices. 

Education suffers sometimes from those who rush to 
aid it, from those who invent mechanical devices for 
it and who become so much more interested in the 
mechanical device than in the process itself. If we 
could only learn that all our devices, all our machin- 
ery, are subordinate and adjuvant, and are to be kept 
in their proper place ! When we become supremely 
wise and supremely skilful perhaps we shall be able to 
dispense with them altogether. 

At the heart of this educational process, giving it 
great dignity and direction, lies the most precious 
thing in the world, human personality. Human per- 
sonality is an end in itself. To watch it grow, to help 
it grow, to take note of the results of its growth are a 
constant joy and delight. The putting forth of new 
power, the giving evidence of a capacity previously 
non-existent, and the growing responsibility for capa- 
ble and wise self-direction are the tests of an educa- 
tion that is real rather than one that is merely formal 
and mechanical. 

This human personality begins to manifest itself at 
birth, and already in the kindergarten and in the ele- 
mentary school it is the subject of observation and 
care; but it is precisely this same human personality, 
a little more mature, a little better disciplined, a lit- 



60 THE SERVICE OF TEE UNIVERSITY 

tie more closely addicted to fixed habits, that gives 
purpose to the university. There is no qualitative 
change; there is a quantitative gain in power, in habit, 
in capacity; but the quality, the essence, the spiritual 
life at the seat and centre of the process are precisely 
the same at whatever point in the institutional scale 
you bring it under observation. 

The responsibility of the university is doubly great 
because of its traditions, because of its resources, be- 
cause of its equipment, because of its opportunity, and 
because it is the last of man's formal expressions of 
method as to the proper training of his fellow man. 
The university is the very last rung on the trellis- 
work that we put up in order that this tender plant, 
reaching up from earth toward heaven, may find some- 
thing upon which to rest its tendrils as it grows out 
into an independent strength and life of its own. But 
the university cannot be out of sympathy or out of 
contact with the schools, with the institutions of every 
type that deal with human personality in its earlier 
and less mature forms. A true university is a proving- 
ground for personality and for intellectual power and a 
splendid gymnasium for the exercise of the muscles of 
the intellect and of the will. The primary purpose of 
the university is to provide the companionship of 
scholars for scholars at a time when sufficient matur- 
ity has been reached to make the joy of the intellec- 
tual life intense and productive. If I may borrow a 
charming phrase from a colleague of mine, I should 
say that a university is a company of scholars in which 



THE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 61 

those who have discovered the mind make full, prof- 
itable, and productive use of their discovery. 

The temptation to define a university is very great 
and the task is very difficult. The university has 
manifested itself in many forms and in many ways. 
It is a far cry from the little group of students of the 
art of healing who gathered long ago about a bubbling 
spring in the south of Italy and made the University 
of Salerno; from the band of eager scholars of the 
Roman law who congregated in Bologna to hear Ir- 
nerius tell what it was that the Roman world, already 
lost, had left in form and structure to the civilization 
that the barbarian peoples were building upon the 
place where Rome once was; from the day when a band 
of these students exposed themselves to heat, to cold, 
to fatigue, to expense, to danger, in order that they 
might tramp, foot weary, across the plains of France 
to hear the masters of the schools expound the knowl- 
edge of the time on the hills that rise on either side of 
the River Seine, which were the birthplace of the 
University of Paris — it is a far cry, I say, from all 
that to the great busy universities of Berlin, of Vienna, 
of Paris, to the halls and walls of Oxford and of Cam- 
bridge, to Edinburgh and to St. Andrews, to the uni- 
versities of our own land, of Canada, and those on the 
other shore of the southern sea. But they all have 
something in common. It is possible to seek and to 
find that common denominator and to relate all these 
great undertakings and achievements of the human 
spirit in a class and so to define them. 



62 THE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 

Nearly twenty years ago I ventured to offer a defini- 
tion of a university which I have seen no reason to 
change. A college of the liberal arts is not a university, 
even if its requirements for admission be higher or 
more complicated than usual. The college has its 
task, which is the training of American citizens who 
shall be educated gentlemen. A college surrounded by 
or allied to a group of technical or professional facul- 
ties or schools is not a university. A university is an 
institution where students adequately trained by 
previous study of the liberal arts and sciences are led 
into special fields of learning and research by teachers 
of high excellence and originality, and where by the 
agency of libraries, museums, laboratories, and publica- 
tions knowledge is conserved, advanced, and dissemi- 
nated. Teaching is only one function of a university, 
and perhaps the smallest one. Its chief function is the 
conservation, the advancement, and the dissemination 
of knowledge, the pushing out of that border-line be- 
tween the known and the unknown which constitutes 
the human horizon. The student who has felt the 
thrill of discovery, however slight, however unim- 
portant; the student who has put his foot on ground 
in letters, in science, in philosophy, where no man's 
foot had ever been before, knows what it is to feel the 
exaltation of discovery. He has entered into the spirit 
of the university. He has joined the household of 
Socrates. 

What the Germans call the philosophical faculty is 
at once the essence and the glory of the university. 



THE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 63 

There can be no university where the spirit and the 
methods of this faculty do not dominate. Indeed, a 
university is a thing, a place, a spirit, and not a name 
at all. No institution can become a university by 
merely calling itself so. It must come into spiritual 
kinship with those that have worthily borne the name 
since universities were. If Mr. Lowell exaggerated a 
little when he said at Harvard some years ago that a 
university is a place where nothing useful is taught, 
surely he exaggerated on the right side. Doubtless 
what he had in mind was the fact that the university 
is a place where everything else is not subordinated to 
the immediately gainful or practical. The university 
is the resting-place of those activities, those scholarly 
aspirations, those intellectual endeavors which make 
for spiritual insight, spiritual depth, and spiritual 
beauty, but which cannot be transmuted into any coin 
less base than highest human service. 

Then the university relates itself in closest fashion 
to the needs and aspirations of the state, the civic or- 
der, the community. The university is the home of 
that freedom of the spirit which is liberty; liberty to 
think, liberty to speak, liberty to teach, always ob- 
serving those limits which common sense, right feel- 
ing, and a decent respect for the opinions of mankind 
put upon all of us. 

It has seemed to me that man's faith in liberty has 
weakened a good deal in these later years. As I read 
the signs of the times abroad and at home, I should 
say that man's belief in liberty is less vital, his grip 



64 THE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 

upon it less firm, than they were a hundred years ago. 
On every side and in almost every land it is now pro- 
posed to achieve those aims for which liberty has been 
supposed to be the best agent, by substituting for 
liberty the essentially mediaeval instrument of regula- 
tion. There are strong and able men who believe 
that what the single tyrant could not accomplish the 
many-headed majority may do. It appears to be likely 
that the world will undergo another experience of this 
time-old experiment which has been tried so often, un- 
til once more its futility is made plain to every one; 
and then, doubtless after some of us are gone, by 
common consent the search for liberty and its right 
exercise will be resumed. 

But there is happily no sign that liberty is to be 
driven out of the university. If the universities give 
liberty a home and keep alive the little flame that has 
illumined the world so brightly and so long, man is 
just as sure to return to the pursuit of liberty and its 
right exercise as the dawn is to follow the darkest night. 

Liberty implies a discipline which is self-discipline, 
and liberty is not license. It implies a discipline by 
which the human spirit has taken over from the world 
about it, from history, from tradition, from morality, 
from human feeling, a great fund of material and made 
it into habits of self-control, self-direction, self-order- 
ing. The institutions of civilization are the world's 
highest and best example of a disciplined liberty. It 
is a function of the university to show liberty at work 
under the restraint which self-discipline imposes. 



THE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 6$ 

Moreover, true liberty implies reverence and carries 
reverence in its breast; reverence for that which lasts, 
reverence for that which has proved itself, reverence 
for that which bears the marks of excellence, reverence 
for that which calls man up out of and above himself. 
That university falls short of its opportunity which 
does not give constant lessons in a liberty that is self- 
disciplined and that is reverent. 

This liberty which the university cherishes is the 
persistent foe of all forms of artificial equality, of all 
forms of mechanical procedure, and of all manifesta- 
tions of a smug satisfaction with chains of an intel- 
lectual and moral narrowness. It is a function of the 
university in every land to make this so plain that he 
who runs may read. 

We must not shut our eyes to the fact that the task 
of the university grows greater as the difficulties of 
democracy grow heavier and more numerous. But the 
university dare not shrink from its responsibility, from 
its call to public service, from its protection of liberty. 
The university must not follow, it must lead. The 
university must not seek for popularity, it must re- 
main true to principle. The university must not sac- 
rifice its independence either through fear of criticism 
or abuse or through hope of favors and of gain. We 
dare not be false to our great tradition. Remember 
that of all existing institutions of civilization which 
have had their origin in the western world, the univer- 
sity is now the oldest save only the Christian church 
and the Roman law. The university has witnessed the 



66 THE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 

decline and fall of empires, the migration of peoples, 
the discovery of continents, and one revolution after 
another in the intellectual, social, and political life of 
man. Of all these the university may say, in the well- 
known words of the pious iEneas, omitting only his 
adjective of misery, 

"Quaeque ipse vidi 
Et quorum pars magna fui." 

The university has been at the heart and centre of 
almost every great movement in the western world 
that has an intellectual aspect or an intellectual origin. 
Its responsibility was never so heavy as it is to-day. 
This is true whether you look to Germany, to Italy, to 
France, to Russia, to England, to Scotland, to Canada, 
to America, to the Latin-American republics, or to the 
new commonwealths of Australia and South Africa. 
What is it that the statesmen of New China, feeling 
the flow of a fresh life-blood in the nation's veins, first 
propose to imitate out of all the world ? They wish to 
imitate the university as Europe and America know it, 
and for the very purposes which have made it so per- 
manent and so powerful in Europe and in America. 

We are looking out, by common consent, upon a new 
and changing intellectual and social sea. The sight is 
unfamiliar to the individual but not to the university. 
The university has seen it so often, whether the change 
has been for good or for ill, that the university knows 
that if only it keeps its mind clear and its heart true 
and the prow of its ship turned toward the pole-star, it 



THE SERVICE OF THE UNIVERSITY 67 

will survive these changes, whatever they may be, and 
will contribute to make them beneficent. The uni- 
versity knows by long experience that it will come out 
of all these changes stronger, more influential, and 
bearing a heavier responsibility than ever. 

I do not speak of the university which is brick and 
stone and mortar and steel. I do not even speak of 
the university which is books and laboratories and 
classrooms and thronging companies of students. I 
speak of the university as a great human ideal. I 
speak of it as the free pursuit of truth by scholars in 
association, partly for the joy of discovery in the pur- 
suit of knowledge, partly for the service to one's fellow 
men through the results of discovery and the pursuit 
of knowledges] 

When I look back and remember what the univer- 
sity so conceived has done, when I remember the great 
names, the noble characters, the splendid achieve- 
ments that are built forever into its thousand and 
more years of history, I think I can see that we have 
only to remain true to our high tradition, only to hold 
fast to our inflexible purpose, only to continue to 
nourish a disciplined and reverent liberty, to make it 
certain that the university will remain to serve man- 
kind when even the marble and steel of this great build- 
ing will have crumbled and rusted into dust. 



V 
MEMORY AND FAITH 



Address at the Annual Commemoration Service, St. Paul's Chapel, 
Columbia University, December 6, 1914 



MEMORY AND FAITH 

To one who knows and loves Columbia University 
and who has passed his whole life in the university's 
service, this day and this occasion are full of solemn 
significance. In our noble commemoration service we 
are to reflect on the immortality of the university, its 
ideals, its hopes, its achievements on the one hand, 
and on the quick passing of even the fullest and the 
longest human life on the other. The occasion invites 
us to compare these two phenomena and to interpret 
them each in terms of the other. We are to picture 
to ourselves for a few moments the planning and the 
upbuilding of one of humanity's freest and finest prod- 
ucts, and we are to dwell upon the life and the ser- 
vices of those workmen whose task on the great struc- 
ture is done. To some it was given to draw plans and 
to lay foundations; to others it was given to aid wisely 
and well in making the superstructure rise upward 
through the long course of years; to still others it 
was given to add to the building those marks of beauty 
which are the fruit of genius and to surround it with 
those tender associations which are the accompani- 
ment of fine and gentle character. Where the task is 
infinite and the time unending there can be no ap- 
praisal of service in terms of accomplishment. The 
greatest accomplishment seems small indeed when 

71 



72 MEMORY AND FAITH 

measured by such standards. Service in such a task 
must be appraised, recorded, and lovingly dwelt upon 
in terms of sacrifice, of purpose, of spirit. 

The progress of civilization — if civilization has 
really progressed — is marked in each of its several 
stages by typical visible institutions into which the 
prophets, the seers, and the spiritual leaders of an 
epoch put all that is best in themselves and in their 
time. The spiritual life, the reflection, and the aspira- 
tion of the Middle Ages poured themselves out into 
those great cathedrals which dot the hills and plains 
of Europe, with their towers and spires pointing 
toward the heaven that they fain would reach, with 
their windows bearing in superb adornment symbolic 
representation of all that the Middle Ages held most 
dear, and with their doors wide open that all men 
might enter to see and hear and share in their message 
and in their meaning. The form of reflection and the 
form of faith that built those splendid churches are no 
longer found dominant among us, but they themselves 
remain, not alone as monuments of one of the most 
splendid periods in the whole record of human achieve- 
ment but as milestones along the pathway of the hu- 
man spirit toward its distant goal. Even to-day we 
can almost see the patient artist of centuries long gone 
working with devoted skill and with loving care to the 
end that an arch, a window, an altar-piece, or a pinna- 
cle might be made more beautiful and might carry 
forever on its carved face more of what he himself, in 
his simple-minded, placid faith, was and felt. Time 



MEMORY AND FAITH 73 

has passed; stupendous changes have come over the 
mind and the spirit of man, and another form of hu- 
man institution has pushed the cathedral aside into 
history. That newer institution is almost as old as 
the cathedral itself, but it was ages long in coming into 
its full inheritance. That institution is the university. 
Everywhere the university embodies the ambitions, the 
ideals, and the hopes of the age in which we live. It 
includes the anxious and assiduous pursuit of truth 
on the one hand, and the training and guiding of the 
younger generation on the other, as well as the pour- 
ing out of all the fruits of its experience and its wis- 
dom before the people so that the whole people may 
share those fruits to their inestimable advantage. 

He who really understands a university and enters 
into its spirit understands his own time and all time. 
The university puts behind it and away from it the 
meaner and the baser motives and feelings. It has 
no place for greed, for jealousy, for vanity, or for 
empty boasting. The only emulation it admits is 
emulation in the pursuit of truth and in the service of 
mankind. Its life is an open book; its treasures are 
the men who make it and the men whom it in turn 
makes. No other product of humanity — no form of 
government, no work of letters or of art, no discovery 
in science, and no new conquest of nature's forces — 
is so human, so truly human, and so fully representa- 
tive of humanity as is the university truly conceived. 
Its fabric may be bombarded and burnt, but its spirit 
cannot be touched by cannon or by fire. It may be 



74 MEMORY AND FAITH 

deprived of means with which to exert its powers and 
capacities to the utmost, but it cannot be prevented 
from doing all that is possible for it to do in pursuit 
of its everlasting and uplifting purpose. Those who 
can see in the university nothing more than a group of 
stately buildings, a collection of rare and useful books, 
quantities of modern and well-adapted apparatus, and 
thronging companies of students eager to be shown 
how to grasp hold of life in some fashion that will 
produce adequate economic return, do not see the uni- 
versity at all. All these things are there, but they are 
on the surface only. The deeper things in a univer- 
sity's life and history are only known and felt by those 
who are able to go beneath the surface as it presents 
itself day by day, and to feel the majestic onward 
sweep of the great current of spiritual life with its 
grand tradition that finds in the university at once a 
garment and a form of highest and most lasting ex- 
pression. 

It is from a university so conceived that there have 
gone out in the year now closing many noble and gen- 
erous lives. Some of them had been so fortunate as 
to be permitted to carry large and heavy stones to the 
rising structure and to leave their names carved for- 
ever upon it. Others have been mysteriously taken 
from the work when life was all before them, when 
they were just beginning to feel the joy of the task 
and to appreciate in some measure its larger meanings. 
To-day we remember them not alone for what they 
did, but for what they wished to do; and we like to 
believe that somewhere and somehow beyond this ken 



MEMORY AND FAITH 75 

of ours they are able to go forward unfettered with 
their work. 

Philosophers and poets have in turn been moved to 
look upon life now as a tragedy and now as a comedy. 
For one it is an inexplicable mystery, and for another 
it is something that can be in every part weighed, 
measured, counted, and in so far understood. In fact, 
life is all these things and yet none of them. It has 
an aspect, as it turns its face to the revolving sun of 
time, that is now tragic, now comic, now mysterious, 
now understandable; but it is much more than all 
these and far different from them all. Life is so much 
the ultimate fact that everything else must be stated 
in terms of it, while it can be adequately stated in 
terms of nothing but itself. The serene penetration of 
a Sophocles, the robust aspiration of a St. Augustine, 
the subtle gentleness of a Pascal, and the magical re- 
flective power of a Kant have all been exhausted, and 
more than exhausted, in attempting to transmute life 
into language and life's problems into simpler terms. 
Sophocles, St. Augustine, Pascal, and Kant have be- 
come immortal through the literally splendid char- 
acter of their studies and portrayals of life; but life 
remains after all that they and a thousand others have 
contributed to its understanding, the ultimate fact. 
Its absence is as inconceivable as its extinction is in- 
credible. 

In this commemoration service we stand in contem- 
plation of the two most impressive and controlling 
facts of life — memory and faith. It is upon memory 
and upon faith that we rest for everything that we 



76 MEMORY AND FAITH 

call real and for everything that we call inspiring. 
Odd as it may sound, there is no such thing as the 
present. By the present we mean only the invisible 
dividing line between what has just been and what will 
in an instant be. While we speak the little word now 
with which we try to fix the passing moment, that 
moment has already gone to join the unmeasured and 
the unplumbed past which looks to memory alone for 
its existence. The intuition of Heraclitus was cor- 
rect. Everything constantly changes. What we really 
mean by the present is the most recently past, with 
perhaps some reference to the nearer aspects of the 
oncoming future. What is past is in turn drawn by 
the slender and imperceptible thread of the present 
from the exhaustless store of that future which is 
posited by faith and on which that same faith builds 
all of life's activities, hopes, and ambitions. We re- 
member those who were with us on yesterday and we 
have faith that they will be with us again on the mor- 
row. He who would build his life only upon what he 
sees and hears and touches, and therefore upon what 
he thinks he knows, builds not upon reality but upon 
the oldest and most persistent of illusions. The philo- 
sophical egotist, heedless of the teaching of Socrates, 
hath said in his heart that there is no world but his 
own. Upon him we need waste no words, but may 
leave him in self-satisfied contemplation of his petty 
product. 

To-day, then, we find ourselves first of all remem- 
bering. We recall with affection the names, the 
forms, the activities of those who are no longer within 



MEMORY AND FAITH 77 

our sight. They are very real and ever present to us 
by reason of our manifold and powerful associations 
with them. We can trace their footsteps and the 
marks of their handiwork in, about, and upon the fab- 
ric, seen and unseen, of the university of our love. 
Then we turn from our memory to our faith. We try 
in vain to picture where those who have gone may 
now be or how they may now be at work. Somehow 
we cannot divest ourselves of the feeling, the belief, 
the faith that, while there has been interruption in 
the form of their activity and in the conditions of 
their existence, that activity and that existence still 
are. The alternative revolts intelligence and reduces 
reason to irrationality. 

There is yet another figure which helps us to link 
our memory and our faith. In this university we 
have before our eyes one of the storied hanging-gar- 
dens of the world. Into it there come each year hun- 
dreds, and even thousands, of tender shoots of the 
human plant. In this garden they are set out, some- 
times in even rows, sometimes irregularly, according 
as each one will flourish best. They are nourished 
and cared for. They are trained to grow upward, 
and, if it be their nature, they are made to stand alone 
and to support their own weight. In the fulness of 
time these tender shoots have grown into fine strong 
plants and trees. They put forth buds and flowers. 
They throw protecting shade, and when the due time 
comes they ripen and scatter themselves over the soil 
of the garden to enrich and to fertilize it for new gen- 
erations like their own. They have manifested their 



78 MEMORY AND FAITH 

presence and they have left a remembrance, some of 
beauty, some of strength, some of protecting shade, 
some of fertilizing and enriching power. Each one 
has done its part. Each has drawn into itself from 
the soil of the garden in which it is set, rich with the 
tradition and human service of over a century and a 
half, and from the atmosphere of freedom and confi- 
dent hope that glistens round about, those foods which 
each living thing knows how to choose and to make 
into structure, and, through structure, to grow, to 
blossom, to fade, and to pass back into the great 
stream of life from which all life comes. In this hang- 
ing-garden there is no death. There is only that 
changed life which brings forth life again more abun- 
dantly. 

"I with uncovered head 
Salute the sacred dead, 
Who went, and who return not. — Say not so ! 
'Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay, 
But the high faith that failed not by the way; 
Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave; 
No bar of endless night exiles the brave; 

• ••»•••• 

In every nobler mood 
We feel the orient of their spirit glow, 
Part of our life's unalterable good, 
Of all our saintlier aspiration; 

They come transfigured back, 
Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, 
Beautiful evermore, and with the rays 
Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation !" 



VI 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY 
TEACHER, AND UNIVERSITY STUDENT 



Address at Johns Hopkins University on Commemoration Day, 

February 22, 1915 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY 
TEACHER, AND UNIVERSITY STUDENT 

In accordance with fortunate custom, members of 
this university are assembled to commemorate its 
ideals and its purposes, to recall with affectionate re- 
gard the names of those great ornaments of the uni- 
versity who are gone, and on this occasion also to wish 
Godspeed to him who has recently been chosen to its 
high office of president. 

More or less that is not new has of late been written 
about this office, as well as more or less that is not 
true. The office itself is in its historic evolution the 
outgrowth and the product of personality. It depends 
for its usefulness and effectiveness wholly upon per- 
sonality and not at all upon authority. Judged by the 
length and the security of tenure of its various incum- 
bents at different institutions, the office is what would 
be called in the business world an extra-hazardous 
risk. Disturbance relating to it is not infrequent, and 
eviction from it is not unknown. Nevertheless, am- 
bition to hold it is well-nigh universal among academic 
persons. 

The beginnings of the modern office of university 
president are to be seen in the careers of Tappan at 
Michigan, of Wayland at Brown, and of Anderson at 

Rochester. Barnard, of Mississippi and of Columbia, 

81 



82 PRESIDENT, TEACHER, STUDENT 

was probably the first to give to the office its sig- 
nificant relationship to general educational policy and 
to the philosophy of education. White of Cornell, 
Gilman of Johns Hopkins, and Harper of Chicago 
were the earliest of that small but powerful group who 
have been able to put their hands to the invigorating 
and inspiring task of creating a new institution out of 
an idea. Eliot of Harvard is the pioneer among those 
whose work and pleasure it has been to put a wholly 
new and reconstructed modern building upon an old 
and highly respected foundation. These men, two of 
whom fortunately still live to give us constant coun- 
sel and guidance, will occupy the chief places in our 
academic Pantheon of the nineteenth century. As 
their names are heard it will be recognized that they 
have, each in his own way, helped to establish another 
striking characteristic of the office that they adorned — 
its direct relation to public service and to the instruc- 
tion and elevation of public opinion. It is a matter of 
just pride to those who have chosen the academic life 
and who follow it, that American citizenship and 
American scholarship bear upon their rolls such names 
as these. 

It is worth while to notice the reaching out in other 
lands, where universities are much older than with us 
and where tradition is less rudely disturbed than is so 
often the case here, for the establishment among them 
of those academic relationships and responsibilities 
that have done such service in America. When the 
Ministerialdirektor in the Cultusministerium of Prus- 



PRESIDENT, TEACHER, STUDENT 83 

sia is a sufficiently powerful personality, he is in effect 
president not of one Prussian university but of the en- 
tire eleven. Shortly before his death I was walking 
one summer day in the forest at Wilhelmshohe with 
Doctor Friedrich Althoff, a true ava% avSp&v and one 
of the most devoted and efficient administrators of 
education that the world has known. Doctor Althoff 
was then, and had been for many years, Ministerial- 
direktor in the Prussian Cultusministerium. He asked 
a number of questions as to how university business 
was transacted in America, as to how responsibility for 
certain acts and policies was fixed, and in particular as 
to how appointments to important academic posts 
were made. When in reply the great variety of meth- 
ods for doing all these things in the United States was 
described to him at some length, Doctor Althoff threw 
up his hands in despair and said: "Impracticable! 
Impossible ! Here I do all that myself, or take care 
that it is done." He went on to express the hope that 
his life might be spared to work out some plan for the 
better organization of the Prussian universities to the 
end that, without in any way separating them from the 
ultimate and complete control of the state, each uni- 
versity might have an administrative head of its own 
charged with substantially the same duties as fall to 
the lot of a university president in America. In France 
the accomplished Liard in Paris, and in Great Britain 
the principals of the four Scottish universities, as well 
as Michael Sadler at Leeds, Herbert Fisher at Shef- 
field, and Sir Henry Miers, just now leaving London 



84 PRESIDENT, TEACHER, STUDENT 

for Manchester, have duties and responsibilities that 
are in most respects analogous to those that devolve 
upon the university president here. Upon the judicious 
and far-sighted use of the opportunities that the office 
affords will depend in large measure the influence, the 
importance, and the productiveness of the univer- 
sities of the world during the next generation or two. 
The duties and responsibilities of the office of uni- 
versity president may be summed up in very few 
words. They are the jealous care and close oversight 
of the work and interests of the university taken as a 
whole, and the guidance of its relations toward the 
public. The statutes of a given university may be 
more or less specific in regard to the office of the presi- 
dent, and they may intrust to the incumbent of that 
office greater or less authority, but the fact remains 
that the office will be in chief part what the incumbent 
makes it, and the measure of its authority will be the 
force of his personality. No autocrat and no self- 
seeker can long maintain himself in it. A great office 
makes a great man seem greater still by reason of the 
opportunity it affords him for the use of his powers; a 
great office makes a small man seem smaller still by 
reason of the fierce light which it causes to fall upon his 
littleness. It is one of the most satisfactory incidents 
in the history of the American democracy that it has 
brought into existence an important and conspicuous 
office whose incumbent is set apart by his very in- 
cumbency to represent in our American life the prin- 
ciples and ideals upon which universities are built and 



PRESIDENT, TEACHER, STUDENT 85 

for which they exist, and to hold these principles and 
these ideals insistently before the public attention. 
The man of letters, the experimental scientist, the ac- 
complished student of history or of economics, is, by 
reason of his university position, under obligation to 
represent one aspect of university activity and uni- 
versity interest to the public at large. It is the func- 
tion of the university president to represent the uni- 
versity and that for which it stands in their entirety. 
In any large and complex university organization the 
wise president will live almost entirely in the future. 
The detailed matters of to-day will be dealt with by 
others. He, however, will constantly scan the horizon 
on the outlook for new problems and new opportu- 
nities for scholarship and for service. 

Within the university itself it is the proper function 
of the president to be the friend and counsellor both of 
the scholars who teach and of the scholars who learn. 
He has the opportunity and privilege to bring to the 
consideration of their several problems and difficulties 
the point of view of the whole university, and thereby 
to place at the service of each individual teacher and 
student who seeks his aid the results of consideration 
given elsewhere to similar problems and of experience 
in dealing with them that others have had. It is also 
his duty to interpret the plans, the policies, and the 
needs of the university's teachers and directors of re- 
search to such governing body as may exist to hold 
and to care for the university's property and to allot 
its income in aid of various university undertakings. 



86 PRESIDENT, TEACHER, STUDENT 

All this was clearly understood and admirably stated 
by President Gilman when he wrote at the very be- 
ginnings of this university these words concerning the 
office of the president: 

The President of the University is the authorized means of com- 
munication between the Board and the various officers of instruc- 
tion and administration employed in the University; it shall be his 
duty to consult with the Professors in respect to the development 
of their various departments, and the general interests of the Uni- 
versity; to determine the appropriate duties of the Associates and 
Fellows; and to exercise such superintendence over the buildings, 
apparatus, books and other property as will ensure their protec- 
tion and appropriate use. In respect to these matters and all others 
which concern the welfare of the University, he shall consult fre- 
quently with the Executive Committee, and he shall attend the 
meetings of the Board of Trustees. Purchases, alterations, repairs, 
and other incidental expenses must not be ordered by any of the 
officers of the University without his previous assent or the expressed 
authority of the Board. 

Nothing would be more unfortunate than for the 
office of university president to cease to be an educa- 
tional post and to become merely a business occupa- 
tion. Such a change would certainly be followed by 
the speedy deterioration of the university's ideals and 
by the unconscious commercialization of its methods. 
With such a change the reign of the questionnaire — 
wretched word ! — would be abroad in the land, and the 
ubiquitous inquisitor, governmental or private, armed 
with his measuring-rod, his tape line, and his tables of 
statistics, would speedily reduce the university to a 
not very desirable form of, factory. Systems of cost- 



PRESIDENT, TEACHER, STUDENT 87 

accounting would displace productive scholarship in 
furnishing a standard of judgment as to a university's 
management and usefulness. 

The notion that appears to be held by some that 
there is a divergence of interest between those teach- 
ers who teach and those teachers who are chosen to 
have particular responsibility for the care and support 
of teaching is wholly illusory. It is the true function 
of educational administration to reduce machinery to 
a minimum, to keep it out of sight and as much as 
possible out of mind, and as completely as means will 
permit to set free the two great and largely interde- 
pendent functions of teaching and research. 

At no time has the academic career been so impor- 
tant as it is to-day, at no time has it ever been so well 
compensated, and at no time have those who pursue 
it been offered larger opportunities for the exercise of 
influence on public opinion. It is now the custom 
everywhere in the world to seek the counsel and the 
opinion of the professorial class when any matter of 
public interest is under consideration or in dispute. 
This applies, unfortunately, not only to matters of 
which the professorial class have cognizance, but also 
to matters of which they know little or nothing. The 
result has been to put a new and strange burden upon 
professors and to offer a temptation to the assumption 
of infallibility that has proved too much for some aca- 
demic persons in more lands than one. The per- 
formances, both vocal and other, of not a few univer- 



&& PRESIDENT, TEACHER, STUDENT 

sity professors in many countries, including our own, 
in connection with the great war in Europe, have 
made it seem desirable to many of us to insist upon 
dropping the title of Professor and to substitute for it 
the less combative Mister. 

It is the fashion of the moment not to have any 
fixed principles of knowledge or of conduct, but to pro- 
fess belief in the capacity and ability of each individ- 
ual to make a world philosophy of his own out of such 
materials as chance and temperament may provide. 
This fashion is quite closely followed just now by 
large numbers of those in academic life, and indeed it 
is sometimes exalted as the one sure and certain method 
of finding an acceptable substitute for truth. There 
would appear to be need of a new Socrates who, 
whether as gadfly or in some less disagreeable guise, 
shall do over again what some of us had supposed was 
satisfactorily done once for all during the closing dec- 
ades of the stirring fifth century before Christ. It is 
a long time since Socrates extracted from Gorgias the 
admission that with the ignorant the ignorant man is 
more persuasive than he who has knowledge. 

One result of so many differing man-made, or pro- 
fessor-made, universities is a frequency and variety of 
conflict that it would tax the mathematician to enumer- 
ate and the historian to classify. The notion that 
nothing much that is permanent and worth while has 
been either known or accomplished until our own brave 
selves came upon the scene makes education difficult 



PRESIDENT, TEACHER, STUDENT 89 

and, from some points of view, impossible. If the 
world is to begin over again whenever a new appoint- 
ment is made to a professorial chair, it is reasonably 
plain that the man in the street will soon dispense with 
the services and the guidance of the men of everlasting 
beginnings. In much the same way we are now asked 
to believe that whenever a callow youth makes a 
minute addition to his own stock of information the 
sum total of human knowledge has been increased as 
the result of scientific investigation. It is just this 
mixing up of the individual with the cosmos and of the 
morning paper with the history of civilization that is 
the weakest point in academic teaching at the present 
time, particularly in those subjects which once were 
history, economics, politics, ethics, and public law. 
Those who remember the striking lectures of Heinrich 
von Treitschke, recently discovered by England and 
America and now much discussed in both countries, 
will recall the fact that he gave but scant attention to 
the teaching of the history of Europe and of Germany, 
although his chair was supposed to deal with those 
subjects. What Von Treitschke really did was to 
make lectures on the history of Europe and of Germany 
the vehicle for the very effective and emphatic expres- 
sion of his own personal opinions on men and things in 
the world about him. In some degree, therefore, Von 
Treitschke was the forerunner of that now very con- 
siderable class of American university professors who 
devote no small part of their time to expressing to their 



9 o PRESIDENT, TEACHER, STUDENT 

students their own personal views on the politics, the 
literature, and the society of the day, while in form 
offering instruction on anything from astronomy to 
zoology. There is something to be said for the policy 
of making academic teaching effective by relating it 
to present-day interests and problems, but there is 
nothing to be said for turning academic teaching into 
an exercise in contemporary journalism. When every 
considerable town has its own Napoleon of finance 
and every political group its Hamilton or its Jefferson, 
there is some danger of getting mixed as to standards. 
All these are troubles which have come upon the 
professorial class as a result of the public appeal made 
to us for an expression of opinion on current topics. 
If one be a profound student of Plato he is expected 
without warning to pass an illuminating critical judg- 
ment upon the latest outgiving of Mr. George Bernard 
Shaw. If he happens to be well versed in the economic 
thought of Germany and Austria, he is called upon for 
an authoritative expression of opinion regarding the 
strike of coal-miners in Colorado. If by any chance 
he has ever written a book on any aspect of railway 
organization, management, or finance, he runs the 
risk of being clapped upon a public commission to 
supervise and in part to control the railway systems of 
a state or nation. All these are dangers and embar- 
rassments to which the alert university professor, 
whose name is known in the newspaper offices, is now 
constantly subjected. Avoidance of them is possible 
only for the sagacious and well-balanced scholar who 



PRESIDENT, TEACHER, STUDENT 91 

knows that no single master-key will unlock all human 
doors of difficulty. 

One of the chief tools of the present-day academic 
conjurer is the blessed word sociology, particularly in 
the hands of some one not a trained sociologist. Both 
Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer would be not a 
little surprised to see what has become of the term 
that they fondled so tenderly. It is now stretched to 
include everything that can possibly relate to the 
diagnosis of social ills as well as everything that can 
possibly relate to social therapeutics. Not even the 
subtlest of physicists has yet worked out a theory of 
the elasticity of gases that is adequate to explain the 
potentialities of the word sociology. This word, once 
so innocent and so impressive, is now under a cloud 
because of its attempt to establish a world-empire. 
Poetry and alchemy, science and song, religion and 
mythology, philosophy and magic, are all reduced to 
mere counters in its great world-game. Naturally 
these smaller and ambitious states have become rest- 
less and are showing signs of revolt. They wish to be 
permitted to live their own lives and not to be made 
mere vassals of a mighty overlord who possesses all 
knowledge, who wields all power, and who monopolizes 
all explanations. Just now law is under attack from a 
curious mixture of sentiment and lore that calls itself 
sociological jurisprudence, and which I understand to 
be a sort of legal osteopathy. We can only await with 
some concern the reactions in the appropriate labora- 
tories when a sociological physics, a sociological chem- 



92 PRESIDENT, TEACHER, STUDENT 

istry, and a sociological anatomy appear upon the 
scene. 

Of the American university student it must be said 
that in far too many instances he is prevented from 
getting on as well as he should because he is over- 
taught. In particular, he is overlectured. The tra- 
ditions of school and college are still strong in the uni- 
versities, and the ideal university relations of scholarly 
companionship between teacher and taught have diffi- 
culty in establishing and in maintaining themselves. 
To use — or rather to abuse — the academic lecture by 
making it a medium for the conveyance of mere in- 
formation is to shut one's eyes to the fact that the art 
of printing has been discovered. The proper use of 
the lecture is the critical interpretation by the older 
scholar of the information which the younger scholar 
has gained for himself. Its object is to inspire and to 
guide and by no means merely to inform. 

Indeed, there is some reason to doubt whether the 
undue dominance and prominence of the didactic 
point of view in the modern university is altogether 
an advantage. The happy days at Bologna when the 
students and their rector managed the university, 
when professorial punctuality was enforced by fines, 
and when the familiar professorial practice of dwelling 
unduly on the earlier parts of a subject to the neglect 
of the later parts was checked by the expedient of 
dividing a topic into puncta and requiring the doctor 
to reach each punctum by a specified date, certainly 



PRESIDENT, TEACHER, STUDENT 93 

had much to commend them. Then it was the stu- 
dents who made the rules and disciplined their teach- 
ers; now it is the teachers who make the rules and dis- 
cipline their students. 

The chief object of the university's teaching, of its 
libraries and its laboratories, is after all to arouse in- 
tellectual interest, to stimulate curiosity, and to send 
out a young man on his voyage of discovery filled with 
ardent enthusiasm, enriched by close association with 
wise and noble-hearted men, and imbued with the high 
ambition to make the most of himself and of his chosen 
field of study. If even the most numerously attended 
university can do this for a hundred men each year, 
and if five of the hundred become distinguished and 
one of the five eminent, that university has been suc- 
cessful. It has done a noteworthy service to American 
life, to scholarship, and to science, 



VII 
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 



Address delivered at Swarthmore College, November 14, 1902 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1820 the Amer- 
ican college, as the term is traditionally used and pop- 
ularly understood, came into existence. Before 1820 
it would be difficult to distinguish the college, except 
perhaps in two or three instances, from the secondary 
school of familiar form to-day, the high school or 
academy. This college uniformly (so far as I know) 
gave a four-year course of instruction in prescribed 
studies. The students came at the age of fifteen or 
sixteen and were graduated at nineteen or twenty. 
They were disciplined carefully in a narrow intel- 
lectual field, and it did most of them great good. 
They were obliged to do many things they did not 
like in ways not of their own choosing, and they gained 
in strength and fibre of character thereby. Ambitious 
boys who looked forward to law or theology, and often 
to medicine too, as a professional career, sought the 
college training and college association as a basis and 
groundwork for their later studies and their active 
careers. For the most part they acquitted themselves 
well, and the sort of training that the college gave 
commended itself to the intelligent people of the coun- 
try. The nation was young and crude in those days, 
and it was pushing far out into new and unbroken 
territory. It had rivers to bridge, forests to hew, fields 

97 



98 TEE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

to clear and to sow, homes to build, States to found. 
That was a noble era of creative industry. Life was 
often hard and luxuries were few. Yet the college went 
wherever the population broke a way for it. Eleven 
colleges were founded before the Revolution, and 
12 between 1783 and 1800; no fewer than 33 came 
into existence during the thirty years that followed, 
and 180 between 1830 and the close of the Civil War. 
Many of those founded before 1830 were in the newly 
broken territory. Two were in western Pennsylvania, 
5 in Ohio, 3 in Kentucky, 1 in Tennessee, 1 in Indi- 
ana, 3 in Illinois, and 1 in Missouri. These colleges 
differed from each other in many ways, but they 
agreed in that they conferred one degree at the con- 
clusion of the course, that of bachelor of arts, for sub- 
stantially the same kind and amount of work. Post- 
graduate studies, so called, were almost or quite un- 
known, and the completion of a college course was the 
attainment of a liberal education, as the phrase goes. 
Judged by to-day's rigorous and exacting standards of 
scholarship, the graduates of these colleges did not 
know very much. Nevertheless, their minds were 
carefully trained by devoted teachers, sometimes men 
of rare genius and human insight, and they loved 
letters for their own sake. They grew in manhood 
and came out of the college halls full of ardor in the 
pursuit of high ideals. 

It was this sort of institution which gave the Amer- 
ican college its reputation and which put into the de- 
gree of A. B. the valued significance which it has now 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 99 

so largely lost. Latin, Greek, and mathematics were 
the only subjects a knowledge of which was required 
for entrance to this college. The Latin included gram- 
mar, four books of Caesar's Commentaries, six books of 
Vergil's JEneid, and six orations of Cicero. The 
Greek included grammar, three books of Xenophon's 
Anabasis, and two of Homer's Iliad. The mathe- 
matics included arithmetic, a portion of plane geom- 
etry, and algebra as far as quadratic equations. These 
subjects the boy mastered in school or academy or by 
private tuition; everything else that he learned was in 
the college course. Many of the weaker and less for- 
tunate colleges gave some, or even nearly all, of this 
instruction themselves. 

The college course, properly so called, was made up 
of more Latin, Greek, and mathematics, some English 
literature and rhetoric, a little logic, a little political 
economy, a little moral philosophy, and, usually, a lit- 
tle mental philosophy or metaphysics. Occasionally 
chemistry crept in; more often a combination of me- 
chanics and physics called natural philosophy. His- 
tory, unless it was ancient history, played a small part, 
and the modern European languages were rarely in- 
cluded. 

This institution, with the requirements for admission 
that I have named, with the course of study that I 
have outlined, the students being (usually) from six- 
teen to twenty years of age, is the college which dis- 
tinguishes the American educational system from that 
of Europe. The degree that it gave is the A. B. de- 



ioo THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

gree of the golden age to which one hears such con- 
tinual harking back. What has become of this insti- 
tution, the American college ? 

The college, or academical department, embedded in 
the great universities of to-day, is the lineal descendant 
of the old college, but strangely unlike its ancestor. 
Even the separate and independent college — the small 
college, as it is called — is in many ways very different 
from the older institution of the same name. The 
changes and improvements of the past fifty years have 
removed many of the old educational landmarks and 
rearranged many of the old elements of secondary and 
collegiate instruction. To speak to-day in the terms of 
fifty years ago, without marking carefully the changes 
in the meaning of those terms, is to talk nonsense. 

Almost the only colleges which retain the character- 
istics of the old, traditional type are those which have 
been without the means to respond favorably to the 
influences which have destroyed that type. The small 
college with low standards of admission to a four-year 
course is closer to the American college of history and 
of rhetoric than is any other. 

But if the old college itself has disappeared, the ideal 
for which it stood remains. That ideal was to train 
men roundly, thoroughly, and well for manly and worthy 
living. Their spirits were to be furnished, not their 
pockets filled, by a course of study and training which 
fell just at the right period of their lives, and by close 
and intimate association with others having aims 
similar to their own. No purpose could be more lofty 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 101 

than this, none more practical among a democratic 
people. 

What the old college used to do in four years to this 
end is now done in part by the new college and in part 
by the secondary school. Four years are still required 
to complete the traditional course of study in the 
liberal arts and sciences, but the whole four years are 
no longer passed under one institutional roof. Taking 
Columbia College as a standard, one half of the old 
college's work, measured in terms both of time and of 
content, is done by the secondary school and the re- 
sults are tested by the college admission examination. 
This change has come about by the general raising of 
the requirements for admission, both in quantity and 
in quality, which has gone on at most colleges since 
i860. These requirements for admission have been 
raised because the country has been better served by 
having the earlier part of the work formerly done in 
college transferred to the secondary schools. So trans- 
ferred this work has been brought within the reach of 
tens of thousands of boys who could never have left 
home to get it, and who could never have entered upon 
a four-year college course for lack of means. In 1898 
only one third of the nearly twenty thousand boys 
who were graduated from the public high schools 
looked forward to a course in a college or a scientific 
school, and only 7.18 per cent of all the boys in the 
public high schools were preparing for a college course 
of the old type. If they had had to depend upon the 
college alone for their liberal studies, they would have 



102 THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

known nothing of them. Moreover, secondary-school 
teaching nowadays compares very favorably with 
college teaching. The best secondary schools have 
scholarly teachers, well-furnished libraries, and well- 
equipped laboratories that many a college might well 
envy. Some of the newer subjects are, on the whole, 
taught better in the high schools than in many colleges. 

These are my reasons for believing that the change 
which has raised the requirements for admission to col- 
lege is a good one and a permanent one. 

While this change has been taking place, the colleges 
have for the most part drifted. Too few of them have 
followed clearly conceived and persistently executed 
policies. Most of them have been simply played upon 
by forces from without, and these forces have been re- 
ceived with varying degrees of stubbornness. Hence 
the chaos of standards and of degrees which exists at 
this moment. Where the requirements for admission 
have been raised since i860 by two years of work and 
where the course of study in college is still four years 
long, there is a six-year course in the liberal arts and 
sciences in the place of the old four-year course. 
Where the requirements for admission have been 
raised, and the years spent in college lessened by one, 
there is a five-year course in the liberal arts and sciences 
in place of the old four-year course. Where the re- 
quirements for admission have been raised and a 
four-year course in college maintained, one or two 
years of which are given to professional studies, there 
is left a four-year or a five-year course (as the case 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 103 

may be) in the liberal arts and sciences, and the de- 
gree of A. B. is no longer given wholly for work in arts, 
but for work partly in arts and partly in professional 
studies. In some cases the phrase liberal arts and 
sciences is interpreted broadly, in some narrowly. 
Often an attempt is made to distinguish between the 
older group of college studies and the newer ones, and 
degrees of bachelor of letters, science, and philosophy 
have been introduced to mark the completion of the 
courses other than the traditional one. 

Some or all of these changes and developments may 
be decided improvements upon the older order of things, 
but the point I wish to make is that the results are not 
colleges or college courses as those words were once 
used. Discussions of the new in terms of the old are 
futile and misleading unless the terms employed are 
carefully distinguished and defined. In current dis- 
cussions and debates about the place and value of the 
college there is easily noticeable a good deal of un- 
conscious juggling with words and an equally notice- 
able lack of acquaintance with the facts as they are. 
It is a perfectly defensible position to hold that even 
with the raised requirements for admission the college 
course should still be four years in length, but this 
position must not be defended by appeals to the old 
college and its standards. The supporter of this 
position is not a conservative; he is a radical innovator 
who holds that a six-year course is now necessary in 
order to lay the basis for professional studies and to 
make the preparation for life for which four years for- 



io4 THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

merly sufficed. He must defend his new plan and must 
prove that it promotes scholarship, strengthens char- 
acter, and increases the influence and the usefulness of 
the college in our democratic society. If he can do 
these things I, for one, will throw in my lot with him 
without hesitation. If he cannot prove his case, then 
I prefer to pursue the old ideal along established lines 
by methods adapted to our new knowledge and our 
wider experience. 

As I view the facts, the traditional American college 
is disappearing before our eyes, and will, unless the 
disintegrating influences are checked, disappear en- 
tirely in another generation or two. What we shall 
have left will be either an agreeable finishing school, 
or country club, for the sons of the well-to-do, or a 
combination of academy and school of general science. 
This, again, may be a good thing; and it may, on the 
whole, be a gain rather than a loss to assimilate our 
educational system to those of continental Europe by 
eliminating the college as the connecting-link between 
secondary school and university. But those who so 
hold must not argue in the name of the college which 
they would destroy. They must defend the early 
specialization involved in putting — or rather in keep- 
ing — the professional and technical schools right on 
top of the secondary school. They must defend the 
transformation of the American college into a univer- 
sity faculty of philosophy. It is because I do not be- 
lieve that either defense can be successful that I differ 
with those who attempt these things, and prefer to 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 105 

make a struggle to retain the American college as 
such. 

The two most active and dangerous foes of the Amer- 
ican college to-day appear to me to be those who regard 
a secondary-school training as adequate preparation for 
professional and technical study in a university, and 
those who, mistaking the form for the substance, in- 
sist that the course of collegiate study must be four 
years or nothing, unless it be that an especially hard- 
working student is permitted to squeeze four years' 
work into three. 

The former sacrifice the ideal to the commercial and 
the material, and make every school of law, medicine, 
divinity, and technology in the land a competitor of 
the college. The college cannot stand that sort of 
competition indefinitely, and our life will be the poorer 
and the narrower if it goes. 

The latter, by transforming the college into a uni- 
versity, at least for the latter half of its course, not only 
radically alter the college training and the college de- 
gree considered as ends in themselves, but also put 
the college in a position where it is economically im- 
possible and, from the view-point of social service and 
educational effectiveness, unwise to require the com- 
pletion of its course as a prerequisite to professional 
and technical study. In only four professional schools 
has this been done, two schools of law and two schools 
of medicine; and already, I am told, expressions of 
dissatisfaction, or incomplete satisfaction, with the re- 
sult are heard. The fact that the policy is indefensible 



106 THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

is clearly shown by the tendency to permit so-called 
college students to pursue professional studies for one 
or two years of the undergraduate course. This is an 
elaborate evasion of the issue, and one by which the 
degree of A. B. is made either meaningless as an arts 
'degree or else one given for the completion of a two 
or a three year course in the liberal arts and sciences, 
and not for one of four years. 

Again I say that these new conditions may conceiv- 
ably be better than those which they displace. But, if 
so, the American college is gone and in its place has 
come a new and different institution, no matter what 
its name, and the baccalaureate degree is hereafter to 
be a university and not a college degree. It seems to 
me to be perfectly clear that in this case the small 
college will eventually disappear utterly, even though 
the name survives. The collegiate or academical de- 
partment of a university will continue in a position of 
increasing insignificance — save where maintained for 
a longer or a shorter time by special causes — as an 
American shadow of a German faculty of philosophy. 

Probably few or none of us wish for any such develop- 
ment as this. Least of all is it wished for by those who 
insist so strongly upon the maintenance, at all haz- 
ards, of a four-year college course and the existing 
standards of admission; yet it is the almost certain re- 
sult of the policy which they are now pressing upon us. 
Mistaking words for things, they are striking heavy 
blows at that which they would like to protect. They 
should realize the force of the statement of Francis 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 107 

Wayland, even truer now than when made sixty years 
ago: "There is nothing magical or imperative in the 
term of four years, nor has it any natural relation to a 
course of study. It was adopted as a matter of ac- 
cident; and can have, of itself, no important bearing 
on the subject in hand." 

I want to retain the college not alone as the vestibule 
to the university where scholars are trained and where 
men master the elements of the professional knowl- 
edge required in the practice of law, medicine, teaching, 
engineering, and other similar callings, but as the 
school wherein men are made ready for the work of 
life. If the college is wisely guided these next twenty- 
five years, its students who are looking forward to 
active business careers after graduation ought far to 
exceed in number those who choose scholarship or a 
learned profession as a career. For such students the 
college will be all in all; and with no university course 
or professional school to look forward to, the college 
will be the one centre of their academic memories and 
affections. But to draw such students and to hold 
them in large numbers, and so to impress itself upon 
the country as effectively in the future as in the past, 
the college must be really a college and leave off try- 
ing to be a university. This means that it must come 
back into its own natural and most useful plate. 

Plans to bring this about have been proposed. Most 
of them aim at shortening the time devoted to the 
course of the new college, and so at getting rid of one 
or two of the extra years that have been put on to the 



108 TEE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

course in liberal arts and sciences since i860. The 
reasons why any lowering of the standard of admis- 
sion to college would be against the public interest, I 
have already stated. Three different plans of getting 
through with the college course in three years instead 
of in four have been suggested. The first is to reduce 
the amount of work required for the degree so that it 
can be readily completed in three years. This is the 
plan at Harvard College, where the twenty-one courses 
required for the A. B. degree in 1880 have been dis- 
placed by a requirement of seventeen and one-half 
courses, one and one-half of which may be anticipated 
at entrance. The second is to permit a student to take 
four years' work in three, if physically and mentally 
competent to do so. This plan seems to me objection- 
able, in that it throws upon the student rather than 
upon the college the necessity of meeting a new and 
involved educational situation. It also tempts some 
men to overwork, others to loaf. 

The third plan, and the one which commends itself 
to my judgment, is to recast and remodel the college 
course entirely on a two-year or a three-year basis ac- 
cording to the standard set — and upheld — for admis- 
sion. The existing four-year course cannot be squeezed 
and pulled into a two-year or a three-year shape. It 
cannot be offered to one student on one set of con- 
ditions and to others on another set. There must be 
an entire reconstruction, and the new course, whether 
it occupy two years or three, must have a unity, a pro- 
portion, and a definiteness of its own. It must be a 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 109 

pj/ramid with a new altitude, and not the old pyramid 
truncated. It must be built of the best of the old 
bricks with plenty of new ones added thereto. 

It should be borne in mind, too, that, contrary to the 
hypothesis of some critics, the new and shortened col- 
lege course is not at all the result of the widely preva- 
lent tendency to hurry or to "hustle," nor is it sug- 
gested only by the needs of the professional schools 
in the great universities. It will, I think, displace the 
longer course because it is intellectually, ethically, 
and educationally better. It will train better men and 
render greater public service than will the present 
spun-out four-year course with its inclusion of almost 
every subject of study known to man. There is no 
more obvious psychological fallacy than to suppose 
that the longer the time spent in getting an education, 
the better the results. The chances are that the con- 
trary is true. Habits of dawdling, drifting, and incom- 
plete and unconcentrated attention persisted in from 
sixteen or eighteen to twenty or twenty-two years of 
age will weaken any but the very strongest minds and 
characters. Less time better used is a useful motto 
for the colleges to adopt. 

In the reconstruction which is just beginning, in the 
effort to get back the American college and to keep it, 
much depends upon enforcing a sound and helpful 
standard for admission to college. This has been, and 
in many cases is yet, the most difficult part of the 
problem to deal with. But the progress of the past 
few years is astonishing and full of promise. Co- 



no THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

operation between colleges and between colleges and 
schools has given us the College Entrance Examination 
Board, whose uplifting and steadying influence is felt 
everywhere. Through it the secondary schools learn 
what to aim at, and the colleges learn what to expect 
and insist upon. The enormous educational advan- 
tages of an examination are gained, while the difficul- 
ties and dangers of examinations which repress and 
depress good teaching are reduced to a minimum. 

It will be seen, therefore, that I am hopeful that or- 
der is to come out of the present chaos, that the real 
facts of the existing complicated situation will be rec- 
ognized, and that an educational reconstruction can 
be effected that will save the college for a new period 
of service to the highest ideals of the American people. 



VIII 
THE ACADEMIC CAREER 



From the Annual Report as president of Columbia University, 

June 30, 1910 



THE ACADEMIC CAREER 

The large increase in compensation to the teaching 
staff which has been made during the last few years 
has done inestimable good. The money spent upon 
these advances in compensation, representing as it does 
the annual income at 4 per cent on about three million 
dollars, is one more evidence of the generous and 
thoughtful care which the trustees have exhibited 
from the earliest days of King's College for the com- 
fort and satisfaction of the teaching staff. It is doubt- 
ful whether ever before any similar action of equal 
magnitude has been taken by those charged with the 
government of a university. Indeed, while much re- 
mains to be done to adjust salaries to the new stand- 
ards and cost of living, it may fairly be said that the 
happenings of the past decade have made the lot of a 
member of the permanent teaching staff of Columbia 
University one that is indeed fortunate. In addition to 
the enjoyment of the privilege of devoting several 
months each year to rest, recreation, or private study 
and writing, he has been relieved of much drudgery 
and routine work that were formerly laid upon him; 
he has in very many cases been advanced in compensa- 
tion from 20 to 50 per cent; he has been given the privi- 
lege of leave of absence during half of every seventh 
year without sacrifice of pay, if he prefers this plan to 

113 



H4 THE ACADEMIC CAREER 

taking a full year's leave of absence on half-pay; he 
has been provided with a retiring allowance in case of 
old age or disability, and, under certain circumstances, 
his widow, should he die leaving one, is also taken care 
of. It may be that there is some other career that is 
equally fortunate, but if so the fact does not appear to 
obtrude itself upon the public attention. 

When colleges were small and universities non- 
existent it was possible — but very unusual — to have 
a faculty composed throughout of men of exceptional 
ability and distinction. The rapid growth and multi- 
plication of colleges and universities, however, has 
necessarily drawn into their service men of every type 
and kind, and of these mediocrity has claimed its full 
share. One main difficulty with which the higher in- 
stitutions of learning throughout the world have to 
struggle to-day is militant mediocrity. Distinction is 
to be sought for at whatever cost and strong, guiding 
personalities cannot be too numerous. But at Berlin, 
at Paris, and at Oxford, no less than at Columbia, the 
searching question is being asked, where are to be 
found fit successors to the scholars of the generation 
that is now passing off the stage ? Many are sought, 
but few are found. 

There is room in a great university for scholars 
of every conceivable type. The recluse and the 
dreamer has his place as well as the practical man 
who unites a love of scholarship with skill in affairs 
and who brings the two into constant relation to each 
other. A poem, a musical composition, or a new syn- 



THE ACADEMIC CAREER 115 

thesis in the higher reaches of pure mathematics 
brings lustre to a university, as does a new invention 
in the field of engineering, a new discovery in the 
laboratory, or a new application of old principles to 
present economic and political needs. Freedom of the 
spirit is the essence of a university's life. Whatever 
else is done or left undone, that freedom must be made 
secure. 

' But freedom imposes responsibility, and there are 
distinct limitations, which ought to be self-imposed, 
upon that academic freedom which was won at so 
great a cost, and which has produced such noble re- 
sults. These are the limitations imposed by common 
morality, common sense, common loyalty, and a decent 
respect for the opinions of mankind. A teacher or 
investigator who offends against common morality has 
destroyed his academic usefulness, whatever may be 
his intellectual attainments. A teacher who offends 
against the plain dictates of common sense is in like 
situation. A teacher who cannot give to the institu- 
tion which maintains him common loyalty and that 
kind of service which loyalty implies ought not to be 
retained through fear of clamor or of criticism. Then, 
too, a university teacher owes a decent respect to the 
opinions of mankind. Men who feel that their per- 
sonal convictions require them to treat the mature 
opinion of the civilized world without respect or with 
contempt may well be given an opportunity to do so 
from private station and without the added influence 
and prestige of a university's name. 



n6 THE ACADEMIC CAREER 

To state these fundamental principles is, however, 
more easy than to apply them, for the answers that 
are made when these principles are urged are so spe- 
cious and the appeals to prejudice that follow are all 
so plausible that their application requires courage 
no less than wisdom. No university can maintain its 
position if its official action appears to be guided by 
prejudice and narrowness of vision. Nevertheless, 
the historical development of the human race can 
hardly be wholly without significance, and there must 
be some reasonable presumption that what has been 
and is need not always take a subordinate and inferior 
place to that which is proposed for the immediate 
future but is yet untested and untried. It ought not 
to escape notice, however, that most of the increas- 
ingly numerous abuses of academic freedom are due 
simply to bad manners and to lack of ordinary tact 
and judgment. 

It is the responsibility of the trustees to give to aca- 
demic freedom that constant and complete protection 
which it must have if the true university spirit is to be 
fostered and preserved, and at the same time to main- 
tain the integrity of the charge committed to their 
care. This must be done without either fear or favor, 
whatever the consequences may be. 



IX 
DIFFERENT TYPES OF ACADEMIC TEACHER 



From the Annual Report as president of Columbia University, 

June 30, 1919 



DIFFERENT TYPES OF ACADEMIC TEACHER 

It is quite usual to hear criticism levelled against 
an academic teacher for not combining in himself the 
two very distinct characteristics of teaching skill and 
scholarly initiative in research. This criticism is un- 
fair and ought not to go longer unanswered. Of great 
teachers there are not very many in a generation, and 
nothing is more certain than that such are born and 
not made. Of good teachers there are, on the other 
hand, a fair supply. These are the men and women 
who, by reason of sound if sometimes partial knowledge, 
orderly-mindedness, skill in simple and clear presenta- 
tion, and a gift of sympathy, are able to stimulate 
youth to study and to think. To find fault with such 
man or woman because he or she is not able to make 
important contributions to knowledge is wholly be- 
side the. mark. Very few persons are able to make 
important contributions to knowledge, and such persons 
are only in the rarest instances good teachers. It is 
very often true that the most distinguished scholars 
and men of science in a university are among its poorest 
teachers. The reason is simple. Their intellectual in- 
terests lie elsewhere and they have neither the mental 
energy nor the fund of human sympathy to give to 
struggling and often ill-prepared youth who may come 

to them for instruction and advice. Once in a long 

119 



1 20 DIFFERENT TYPES 

while there appears a Huxley, or a Du Bois-Reymond, 
or a William G. Sumner, but the number of such is 
sadly few. It may be said of many great scholars as 
Mrs. Humphry Ward recently wrote of Bishop 
Stubbs, probably the greatest name among the Eng- 
lish historians during the latter half of the nineteenth 
century: "He had no gifts — it was his chief weakness 
as a teacher — for creating a young school around him, 
setting one young man to work on this job, and an- 
other on that, as has been done with great success in 
many instances abroad. He was too reserved, too 
critical, perhaps too sensitive." A man such as this 
may, nevertheless, have great influence in the back- 
ground of a university and add enormously to its re- 
pute, despite the fact that his work is almost as in- 
dividual as if it were done in his own study in a remote 
village apart from university companionship and uni- 
versity association. The modern university will be 
glad, and will aim, to find place for scholars and men 
of science of each of these types and of every type. 
There is plenty of opportunity for the skilful teacher 
who is not especially original or vigorous in research, 
and there is always opportunity for the alert-minded 
man of high imagination and great power of concen- 
tration who can and does make a real addition to the 
world's knowledge. On the other hand, quite too much 
attention is paid to those who when they make some 
slight addition to their own stock of information fancy 
that the world's store of knowledge is thereby increased 
by a new discovery. 



OF ACADEMIC TEACHER 121 

It is quite fashionable to attack university teachers as 
unduly radical and revolutionary. The truth is that the 
radicals and revolutionaries among them are so few 
that they are very conspicuous. The university 
teacher, on the contrary, is usually very conservative, 
very solid-minded, and very difficult to bring to the 
support of a new idea or a new project. The history 
of the development of any important university will 
amply illustrate this fact. The notion that some uni- 
versity professors are dangerously radical because 
their salaries are not large enough is more than usually 
uncomplimentary. Such a view pushes the economic 
interpretation of history pretty far. The man who 
will change his views on economic, historical, or polit- 
ical subjects because his salary is doubled is made of 
pretty poor stuff, and the views of such a man need not 
trouble any one very seriously. 

The most significant thing that has happened to the 
university teacher during the past decade is the num- 
ber and variety of contacts that he has established 
with the practical affairs of life. These contacts were 
once confined to the teacher of law, of medicine, or of 
engineering. They are now shared by pretty much all 
types of university teacher. When a specialist in the 
Zend Avesta and in the philosophy of the Parsees is 
sent half-way round the world to plan relief for the 
suffering population of Persia, when a professor of 
psychology is intrusted with the task of framing a plan 
for the selection of officers for the United States army, 
when a professor of electromechanics is set to hunting 



122 DIFFERENT TYPES 

the submarine in association with the officers of the 
United States navy, when a professor of physiography 
is first sent for to aid the general staff in formulating 
a plan of military operations on the field of battle and 
is then set to deciding where the boundary-line be- 
tween two reconstituted nations shall run, the univer- 
sities are getting pretty closely in touch with the prac- 
tical events of the time. Moreover, the world at large 
is showing a new respect for men who have spent years 
in scholarly discipline and association. The President 
of the United States was for a quarter of a century a 
teacher of history and political science in three col- 
leges; the president of the council in France once 
taught his native language and its literature to a 
group of American students at Stamford, Connecticut; 
the Prime Minister of Italy holds the chair of economics 
in the University of Naples; the first president of the 
Czechoslovak Republic is the most eminent teacher of 
philosophy among his people; one university professor 
has just resigned as American minister to China and 
another is still serving as American minister to Greece; 
and so it goes through other European countries and 
in the South American republics. The fact of the 
matter is that the university teacher has some time 
since ceased to belong to a class apart, to an isolated 
group leading a life carefully protected and hedged 
about from contact with the world of affairs. The uni- 
versity teacher is everywhere as adviser, as guide, as 
administrator; and as his personal service extends over 
a constantly widening field, so his influence marks the 



. OF ACADEMIC TEACHER 123 

increasing interpenetration of the university and prac- 
tical life. Indeed, there is no better training in prac- 
tical affairs than that which the business of a modern 
university affords. 



X 
METHODS OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING 



From the Annual Report as president of Columbia University, 

June 30, 1907 



METHODS OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING 

There is a marked and healthy tendency among 
university teachers to lay less stress than formerly 
upon differences of opinion as to the relative value and 
importance of different subjects of study, and to de- 
vote more thought to questions connected with the 
most effective presentation to students of the subject- 
matter in any given part of the field of knowledge. 
It is the part of wisdom not only to permit, but to 
encourage, wide diversity of method on the part of 
university teachers, in order that the personality of 
each teacher may express itself most directly and most 
effectively in its contact with students. Methods of 
teaching are more largely dependent upon the in- 
dividual teacher than is often realized, and while cer- 
tain fundamental principles governing all teaching 
appear to be established as the result of study and 
experience, yet when an attempt is made to carry uni- 
formity into matters of detail the result is generally 
failure. 

In those branches of natural science which afford 
opportunity for experiment as well as for observation, 
laboratory methods of teaching have gradually de- 
veloped that are particularly excellent by reason of 
three characteristics. They bring the student in touch 

with concrete facts, they afford opportunity for the 

127 



128 METHODS OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING 

adaptation of the work to the needs and capacity of 
the individual student, and they bring student and 
teacher into close personal association. 

These three characteristics of laboratory instruction 
might with some care be carried over to instruction in 
quite other subjects. The parrot-like repetition of 
passages memorized from a text has largely disappeared 
from college teaching and is not to be found in the 
universities. Unfortunately, however, the substitute 
which has been too often found for the old repetition 
from a text-book is the lecture system which has so 
largely characterized, and still characterizes, the work 
of the German university. Of lectures as a mode of 
imparting knowledge, Mr. Benson, in his delightful 
essays entitled From a College Window, truly says: 

They belong to the days when books were few and expensive; 
when few persons could acquire a library of their own; when lec- 
turers accumulated knowledge that was not the property of the 
world; when notes were laboriously copied and handed on; when 
one of the joys of learning was the consciousness of possessing se- 
crets not known to other men. 

The value of the lecture as a method of instruction 
lies in the opportunity it affords for the expression of 
the personality of the teacher. Its limitations are due 
to the attempt to rely wholly upon the lecture for im- 
parting the desired information. The lecture, if based 
upon a text or a syllabus in the hands of the hearers, 
of which text or syllabus the lecture is an exposition, 
or if accompanied with or followed by discussion of 



METHODS OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING 129 

the material expounded, has great usefulness. Un- 
fortunately, however, too many university teachers, 
rely wholly upon the lecture, without any of these ad- 
ditional aids, and they are not always careful to see 
that their recommendations as to collateral reading 
and study are followed by the students. The result is 
that by the promiscuous use of the lecture system there 
is an enormous waste of power and a great loss of op- 
portunity. The power of the teacher is largely wasted 
because under these circumstances he is able to reach 
and stimulate only the most intelligent and devoted 
students. There is a loss of opportunity because, by 
more personal and intimate methods of presenting the 
subject-matter of instruction, the teacher might easily 
reach all the students who elect to follow his instruc- 
tion. In some cases where the group of students at- 
tending any given academic exercise is small, a num- 
ber of university teachers have hit upon very personal 
and almost ideal methods of giving their guidance and 
instruction. As soon, however, as the group becomes 
moderately large, there is a tendency to have recourse 
to the lecture alone, and the evils which have already 
been pointed out follow promptly in its train. 

Undoubtedly, the university as a whole might do 
much to improve the methods of teaching followed by 
the staff of instruction. For example, it could, if 
means were at hand, provide for each department 
which deals with a literary, a linguistic, an historical, 
an economic, or a philosophical subject, equipment 
similar to that which is provided for the study of 



i 3 o METHODS OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING 

mathematics and the experimental sciences. It could 
bring together in one building or in one group of rooms 
the books and illustrative apparatus useful for the 
presentation of a given subject and thereby put the 
teachers of these subjects in very much the same posi- 
tion as that occupied by the teacher who has provided 
for his use a well-equipped laboratory. 

It may be, too, that our university legislation is open 
to criticism for compelling each student to divide his 
attention among too many subjects of study. At the 
time when this legislation was adopted, there was fear 
lest in the newly organized university, students would 
specialize unduly. It is at least open to debate whether 
as a result of this legislation they are not now com- 
pelled to scatter their intellectual energies unprofit- 
able. 



XI 
COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING 



From the Annual Report as president of Columbia University, 

June 30, 1914 



COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING 

An ever-present question in an institution of the 
higher learning is how to interest officers of instruction 
in the subject of education. They are certain to be 
interested each in his own particular branch of study, 
but much too few of them are interested in education 
itself. The consequence is that the teaching of many 
very famous men is distinctly poor; sometimes it is 
even worse. This results in part from the breakdown 
of the general educational process into a variety of 
highly specialized activities, and in part from the 
carelessness of college teachers as to everything which 
affects a student's manners, speech, conduct, and 
sense of proportion, provided only he gets hold of cer- 
tain facts which the teacher desires to communicate. 
It is also due in large part to the bad tradition which 
so largely prevents the inspection and supervision of 
the work of young teachers by their elders. At one 
time the professor of mathematics in Columbia College 
made a practice of visiting the classroom of each one 
of his junior officers at least once in each week. He 
observed the discipline, the order, and the general 
attitude of the class. He intervened in the instruc- 
tion when he felt moved to do so. He made sugges- 
tions and, if necessary, after the exercise was over 
he gave private criticism to the, junior instructor, 

J33 



134 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING 

In this way the younger man was helped by the ex- 
perience and skill of his elder. To-day such a practice 
is almost unheard of, either in Columbia College or in 
any other college. With the exception of one or two 
departments in which better practices prevail, it is 
usual for even the youngest of instructors to be shut 
up in the classroom with a company of students and 
left to his own devices. The damage he may do in 
learning what teaching is all about is not infrequently 
irreparable, but no older or more experienced head is at 
hand to counsel and to direct him. In this way many 
men grow up to be poor teachers without knowing it. 
They are conscious of growing in scholarly power and 
in acquired knowledge and they readily confuse these 
facts with increase in teaching skill. 

The late Colonel Francis W. Parker once dedi- 
cated a text-book "to all teachers who thought- 
fully and thoroughly prepare every lesson." Herein 
lies the secret of really good teaching. The prepara- 
tion of every lesson, however familiar its subject- 
matter, is the sure protection against mechanical 
routine and dry-as-dust lecturing. This applies equally 
to instruction by lecture, by laboratory work, or by 
classroom teaching and discussion. The first act of a 
really good college teacher is to explain to his class 
what it is proposed to accomplish by the particular 
course of instruction for which they are assembled, 
what methods are to be followed and why, and also 
why a particular subject-matter has been chosen. 
These opening explanations are as necessary to the 



COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING 135 

intelligent student as is a chart to a sailor. The col- 
lege student cannot be expected to guess correctly at 
the aim or purpose of a particular course of instruction 
or to find at once a satisfactory explanation of the sub- 
ject-matter that is presented to him for mastery. To 
throw a child into deep water as a first lesson in swim- 
ming is not intelligent and usually leads to disaster. 
The student should always be told, before setting out 
on one of these intellectual voyages of discovery, what 
haven is his goal and what route is to be taken to 
reach it. After this has been done, the good college 
teacher will have something to say of the literature of 
the subject, of those books that will be found most 
helpful and illuminating, and of how they are to be 
judged and estimated relatively to one another. He 
will then address himself to the task, not of lecturing 
or of quizzing, but of actual teaching. A college class 
that is being well taught as a group is alert and at- 
tentive and every member of the group is in full co- 
operation with the other members and with the teacher. 
Facts are being transformed into factors of knowledge, 
interpretations are being developed and made clear, 
and criticisms are being fairly and frankly dealt with, 
there being complete co-operation and participation 
between teacher and taught. It is not good college 
teaching when the instructor merely lectures to his 
class, much less so when he drones to them. It is not 
good class teaching when the instructor deals with one 
student at a time, leaving the rest of the group listless 
and inattentive and awaiting what is oddly called their 



136 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING 



"turn." In the laboratories, the best teaching is now 
wholly individual. There is to be found what is known 
as constant elbow-touch between the instructor and 
each one of his students. Every student has his own 
particular task and he works diligently upon it, under 
certain fixed restrictions as to time and material, with 
a competent instructor at his elbow for guidance, for 
criticism, and for suggestion. As the student grows in 
maturity and power of self-direction, teaching natu- 
rally tends to become more and more individual until, 
in the advanced work of the university, the very best 
instruction in any subject closely resembles the elbow- 
touch teaching of the laboratory. 

The two mistakes into which college teachers are 
most likely to fall are, first, that of failing to give the 
students such preliminary and introductory explana- 
tions as will serve as an adequate chart for the voyage 
to be undertaken; and, second, that of confusing the 
logical with the psychological order in the presenta- 
tion of facts. The really good teacher knows that the 
logical order is the result of mature reflection and 
close analysis of a large body of related phenomena, 
and he knows too that this comes late in the history 
of intellectual development. He knows also that the 
psychological order — the true order for the teacher 
to follow — is the one which is fixed by the intrinsic 
interest and practical significance of the phenomena 
in question. The good teacher will not try to force 
the logical order of facts or phenomena upon the im- 
mature student. He will present these facts or phe- 



COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING 137 

nomena to him in their psychological order and so 
give him the material with which to understand, when 
his knowledge is sufficiently complete, the logical 
order and all that it means. The notion that one who 
is a master of a subject is thereby of necessity a good 
teacher of that subject is only less misleading and 
mischievous than the notion that a subject may be 
adequately and properly taught by one who has elab- 
orate knowledge of the technic and machinery of 
teaching but whose hold on the subject-matter to be 
taught is very shaky indeed. 

A matter that is closely related to poor teaching is 
found in the growing tendency of college and uni- 
versity departments to vocationalize all their instruc- 
tion. A given department will plan all its courses of 
instruction solely from the point of view of the stu- 
dent who is going to specialize in that field. It is 
increasingly difficult to secure good courses of instruc- 
tion for those who have the very proper desire to gain 
some real knowledge of a given topic without intend- 
ing to become specialists in it. A university depart- 
ment is not well organized and is not doing its duty 
until it establishes and maintains at least one strong 
substantial university course designed primarily for 
students of maturity and power, which course will be 
an end in itself and will present to those who take it 
a general view of the subject-matter of a designated 
field of knowledge, its methods, its literature, and its 
results. It should be possible for an advanced student 
specializing in some other field to gain a general knowl- 



138 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING 

edge of physical problems and processes without be- 
coming a physicist; or a general knowledge of chem- 
ical problems and processes without becoming a chem- 
ist; or a general knowledge of zoological problems and 
processes without becoming a zoologist; or a general 
knowledge of mathematical problems and processes 
without becoming a mathematician. The reply that 
knowledge has become so highly specialized that no 
one can be found to give such courses of instruction is 
the saddest confession of incompetence and educational 
failure that can possibly be made. It ought not to be 
made except under cover of darkness. 

It is worthy of note that while difficulties are found 
in providing general courses of instruction of the kind 
described to deal with a given and limited field of 
knowledge, there is apparently no particular difficulty 
in finding courses that in limpid and desultory fashion 
deal with everything in the heavens above, in the earth 
beneath, and in the waters under the earth. Last year 
a graduate student who was about to leave an Amer- 
ican university made the statement that he had at- 
tended four courses of instruction given by four dif- 
ferent persons under the auspices of four distinct 
departments, and that he had heard substantially the 
same thing in all four. This is surely a type of aca- 
demic freedom upon which some limitation, economic, 
temporal, ethical, or intellectual, might well be placed. 

Columbia University has at its doors one of the 
greatest and most inviting laboratories in the world. 
New York City is a laboratory of almost unexampled 



COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING 139 

magnitude and many-sidedness. Here are courts of 
every sort and kind for the observation and study of 
the student of law; here are hospitals and clinics with- 
out number for the observation and study of the stu- 
dent of medicine; here are engineering undertakings 
that cannot be matched, perhaps, anywhere in the 
world for the observation and study of the student of 
applied science; here are buildings of amazing variety of 
type for the observation and study of the student of 
architecture; here are colleges and schools reaching 
directly hundreds of thousands of human beings for 
the observation and study of students of education; 
here are museums of art and of natural history as well 
as a zoological park and botanical garden of unusual 
excellence for the observation and study of students of 
these subjects; here is a complex and highly organized 
municipal government, a congeries of nationalities, a 
constant stream of inflowing immigration, for the ob- 
servation and study of him who would know the social 
and political problems of to-day at first-hand. An in- 
creasing proportion of the advanced and professional 
work of the university should be done in this labora- 
tory. There should be co-operation at every possible 
point between the university teachers and the directors 
of this laboratory in its various departments and sub- 
divisions, both official and unofficial. Here, as no- 
where else in America, perhaps as nowhere else in the 
world, the advanced student may measure the working 
of different and opposing theories and may see the 
practical results of old and new tendencies and ideals. 



140 COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING 

In this laboratory productive and inquiring scholar- 
ship can speedily test the results and proposals of 
these tendencies and ideals. Every year should see a 
larger number of graduate and professional students 
leaving the university filled with a new pride in the 
city of New York because they have come to know and 
to understand some one of the myriad admirable 
things that happen or are done there. 



XII 
MODERN FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 



From the Annual Report as president of Columbia University, 

June 30, 1918 



MODERN FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 

Restlessness under conditions that have prevailed for 
many years as to school and college instruction in mod- 
ern foreign languages is not of recent date. The teach- 
ers of these subjects have long insisted that they were 
not allotted sufficient time in which to accomplish the 
results that they desired, while the students them- 
selves, their parents, and the teachers of other subjects 
have complained loudly that no matter what the rea- 
son, the fact was that very few American college stu- 
dents had anything approaching an easy familiarity 
with spoken or written French, German, Italian, or 
Spanish. The new international interdependences that 
are a result of the war have put new emphasis upon 
these discontents, and it is high time that some way 
were discovered to meet and to allay them. 

It is probable that the root of the difficulty is to be 
found in the conditions under which the teaching of 
modern foreign languages was begun in American 
schools and colleges. This teaching was not at first ac- 
cepted as a necessary and integral part of the school 
and college curriculum, but was treated as an extra, 
and in old days often paid for as such. When under- 
taken in this way and in this spirit it was hardly possi- 
ble for the teaching of modern foreign languages to 
lead, save in exceptional cases, to any very large result. 

143 



i 4 4 MODERN FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 

It is high time to consider whether this whole branch 
of instruction should not be radically reorganized and 
readjusted to meet conditions that are not only mod- 
ern but very real. 

The American college is still far from realizing the 
goal of modern language teaching described by Henry 
Wadsworth Longfellow in his inaugural address when 
entering upon his work as professor of modern lan- 
guages in Bowdoin College, September 2, 1830. Nearly 
ninety years ago Mr. Longfellow was moved to say: 

A knowledge of the principal languages of modern Europe forms 
in our day an essential part of a liberal education. ... I cannot 
regard the study of a language as the pastime of a listless hour. To 
trace the progress of the human mind through the progressive de- 
velopment of language; to learn how other nations thought, and 
felt, and spake; to enrich the understanding by opening upon it 
new sources of knowledge; and by speaking many tongues to be- 
come a citizen of the world; these are objects worthy of the exertion 
their attainment demands at our hands. 

The mere acquisition of a language is not the ultimate object: 
It is a means to be employed in the acquisition of something which 
lies beyond. I should therefore deem my duty but half performed 
were I to limit my exertions to the narrow bounds of grammatical 
rules: Nay, that I had done little for the intellectual culture of a 
pupil when I had merely put an instrument into his hands, without 
explaining to him its most important uses. 

Mr. Longfellow goes on throughout this notable ad- 
dress to give a general outline of what he conceived to 
be his field of academic duty, and drew a picture as 
satisfying as it was inviting. 



MODERN FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 145 

Except in rare cases it cannot be doubted that the 
study of modern foreign languages has been carried on 
quite apart from any study of the life, the institutions, 
the art, and the civilization of the peoples whose lan- 
guages they are, save that opportunity is given to 
read, more or less haltingly, a few of the great literary 
masterpieces which a particular language enshrines. 
The very name of our academic departments indicates 
a narrowness of view and purpose which we should 
now quickly strive to outgrow. Instead of a Depart- 
ment of Romance Languages and Literatures, for ex- 
ample, there should be, let us say, a Department of the 
Latin Peoples, in which might be assembled not only 
those teachers who give instruction in the Romance 
languages and literatures, but also those who give in- 
struction in the history, the government, the art, and 
the architecture of those peoples that are of direct 
Latin descent. In similar fashion there might be De- 
partments of the Teutonic or Germanic Peoples, of 
the Slavic Peoples, and of the Oriental Peoples. The 
Department of Classical Philology is already appro- 
priately named, since the broad interpretation of that 
term is inclusive of the history, the institutions, the 
art, and the life of the ancient peoples of Greece and 
Rome. The main thing is to cease thinking of a lan- 
guage as something apart or as a mere tool for tech- 
nical use, and to come to regard it as a pathway lead* 
ing to new and inspiring regions of understanding and 
of appreciation. The chief purpose in studying French 
should be to gain an understanding and appreciation 



146 MODERN FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY 

of France, and that cannot follow upon a mere study 
of the language as a form and instrument of literary 
expression alone, vitally important though that be. 



XIII 
TRUE VOCATIONAL PREPARATION 



From the Annual Report as president of Columbia University, 

June 30, 1 91 3 



TRUE VOCATIONAL PREPARATION 

The younger generation shows many signs of being 
too impatient to prepare for life. What is called vo- 
cational training is being steadily pushed down through 
the secondary into the elementary schools, and pre- 
sumably it will soon reach the cradle. The old notion 
that a child should be so trained as to have the fullest 
and most complete possession of its faculties and its 
competences, in order to rise in efficiency, to gain 
larger rewards, and to render more complete service, 
has given way to the new notion that it is quite enough 
if a child is trained in some aptitude to enable it to 
stay where it first finds itself. Of course, under the 
guise of progress, this is retrogression. Carried to its 
logical result, it would mean a static and a stratified 
social order. It would put an end to individual initi- 
ative and to individual opportunity. It is not diffi- 
cult to foretell what results would follow both to 
civilization and to social order and comfort. The basis 
for any true vocational preparation is training to know 
a few things well and thoroughly, and in gaining such 
knowledge to form those habits of mind and of will 
that fit the individual to meet new duties and unfore- 
seen emergencies. This is the real reason why the 
traditional training given at the University of Oxford 

has produced such stupendous results for generations. 

149 



ISO TRUE VOCATIONAL PREPARATION 

Of course the Oxford training has had, to some ex- 
tent at least, selected material to work upon; but it has 
done its work amazingly well. Whether in states- 
manship or at the bar or in the army or in diplomacy 
or in large administrative undertakings in business, 
the man trained at Oxford has won first place by rea- 
son of the character and quality of his performance. 
No such result has been obtained, and no such result 
need be expected, from a school and college training 
which is a quick smattering of many things. At the 
bottom of the educational process lies discipline, and 
the purpose of discipline is to develop the power of 
self-discipline. When discipline is withdrawn, dawdling 
quickly enters, and the habit of dawdling is as corrupt- 
ing to the intellect as it is to the morals. The patience 
to be thorough, the concentration to understand, and 
the persistence to grasp and to apply are the three 
traits that most clearly mark off the truly educated 
and disciplined man from his uneducated and undis- 
ciplined fellow, and they are precisely the three traits 
which are most overlooked and neglected in the mod- 
ern school and college curriculum. A school is sup- 
posed to be modern and progressive if it offers some- 
thing new, regardless of the fact that this something 
new may be not only useless, but harmful, as an educa- 
tional instrument. 

With the growth of democracy the need for self- 
discipline becomes not less, but far greater. When 
great bodies of men were controlled by power from 
without, then they were in so far disciplined; now 



TRUE VOCATIONAL PREPARATION 151 

that in all parts of the world men are shaping their 
own collective action without let or hindrance, the 
need for self-discipline is many times greater than it 
ever was before. In an older civilization self-disci- 
pline was necessary for the protection of individual 
character; to-daj^ it is necessary for the protection of 
society and all its huge interests. 

Too much slovenly reading, particularly of news- 
papers and of magazines, but also of worthless books, 
stands in the way of education and enlightenment. 
In no field of human interest is the substitution of 
quantity for quality more fraught with damage and 
disorder than in that of reading. The builders of the 
Constitution of the United States and the great law- 
yers of the colonial and early national period knew 
but few books, but the books that they knew were 
first-rate books and they knew them well. Nothing 
contributed so much to the fulness of their minds, 
to the keenness of their intellects, or to the lasting 
character of the institutions that they built as their 
reflective grasp on a few great books and on the prin- 
ciples and literary standards which those books taught 
and exemplified. Such a task as that which Gibbon 
set himself over a century ago would be impossible to- 
day, even for a syndicate of Gibbons. There are too 
many books now to enable another History of the De- 
cline and Fall of the Roman Empire to be composed. 
Productivity of the highest type is checked by the 
excess of facilities. This is true both of books and of 
physical apparatus. We could get along well with far 



152 TRUE VOCATIONAL PREPARATION 

fewer books and far less apparatus, and we should be 
likely to get more ideas and a higher type of human 
being. The universities of the world search restlessly 
for truth, but too often they overlook the indubitable 
which lies at their feet. 



XIV 
CRITICISM OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS 



From the Annual Report as president of Columbia University, 

June 30, 1915 



CRITICISM OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS 

A not inconsiderable part of the occupations of the 
president is to reply to letters addressed to him in criti- 
cism of some reported utterance by a member of the 
teaching staff, and in making such reply to point out 
what is the precise status and responsibility of an aca- 
demic teacher, and what is the university's share of 
responsibility for his utterances. The number of such 
criticisms made on the part of the public has notably in- 
creased in recent years, and during the past year, prob- 
ably on account of the European War, these criticisms 
have been even more numerous than heretofore. In 
most cases they are based on incorrect or garbled re- 
ports of what the person in question really said. In 
other cases they reflect merely narrowness of view and 
stupidity, or a desire to use the university as an agent 
for some particular propaganda which the critics hold 
dear. One thing these criticisms have in common: 
they almost invariably conclude by demanding the in- 
stant removal of the offending professor from the rolls 
of the university. 

During the past year one amiable correspondent has 
attacked a university officer under the caption of a 
"Snake at large." The fact that the gentleman in ques- 
tion was not a snake but a professor and that he was 
not at large but in retirement, had no weight in the 

iS5 



156 CRITICISM OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS 

eyes of the writer of the letter. It appears that in this 
case the offense was the expression in public of a favor- 
able opinion as to the nutritive qualities of beer. The 
effect of this reported utterance on the mind of the 
objector was to deprive him of any modicum of reason 
that he may have hitherto possessed. He was and 
still is very much offended that the officer in question 
was not subjected to some public humiliation and re- 
buke. 

In another case a clergyman wrote to object to the 
reported utterances in the classroom — incorrectly re- 
ported, it turned out — of a professor who was described 
as endeavoring to destroy whatever of faith in Chris- 
tianity there was in the members of one of his classes. 
This particular complaint did not ask for the dismissal 
of the professor in question, but his letter left no doubt 
that such action would be entirely acceptable to him. 

A third and more exigent correspondent wished a 
professor dismissed — and dismissed by cable, inasmuch 
as he happened to be in Europe at the time of his of- 
fense — for having written a letter to the public press 
in which he expressed a personal view as to the merits 
of the European War that was not in accordance with 
prevailing American opinion. This correspondent 
based his demand for the professor's discharge upon 
the fact that he was traitorous and densely ignorant. 
Of course these two defects would doubtless have 
weight with the offender's colleagues and with the 
trustees if the matter ever came before them in formal 
fashion. 



CRITICISM OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS 157 

Still another complainant was an official representa- 
tive of a belligerent power, who wrote to denounce a 
university professor as a slanderer because of some dif- 
ference of opinion as to the qualifications and char- 
acter of an individual whose name was given. In this 
case the complainant did not ask for the dismissal of 
the offending professor but only that he should "be 
kindly called to account." 

All this would be amusing were it not sad. It illus- 
trates once more how much the public at large has still 
to learn as to the significance and purpose of univer- 
sities. The notion which is sedulously cultivated in 
some quarters that there are powerful interests, finan- 
cial, economic, and social, which wish to curb the 
proper freedom of speech of university professors in 
America, probably has little or no justification any- 
where. So far as Columbia University is concerned it 
has no justification whatever. That there are large 
elements in the population which do desire to curb the 
proper freedom of speech of university professors is, 
however, indisputable. Evidence for this is to be 
found not only in such correspondence as has just been 
referred to but in letters addressed to the public press, 
and even in editorial utterances on the part of sup- 
posedly reputable newspapers. The fact is that peo- 
ple generally have a great deal to learn as to the 
meaning and functions of a university. The last thing 
that many persons want is freedom either of speech or 
of anything else unless its exercise happens to accord 
with their own somewhat violent and passionate pre- 



158 CRITICISM OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS 

dilections. It must be said, on the other hand, that 
professors of established reputation, sound judgment, 
and good sense rarely if ever find themselves under 
serious criticism from any source. Such men and 
women may hold what opinions they please, since 
they are in the habit of expressing them with discre- 
tion, moderation, good taste, and good sense. It is 
the violation of one or another of these canons which 
produces the occasional disturbance that is so widely 
advertised as an assertion of or attack upon academic 
freedom. Genuine cases of the invasion of academic 
freedom are so rare as to be almost non-existent. It 
may be doubted whether more than two such cases 
have occurred in the United States in the past forty 
years. It is a misnomer to apply the high and splen- 
did term "academic freedom" to exhibitions of bad 
taste and bad manners. A university owes it to itself 
to defend members of its teaching staff from unjust 
and improper attacks made upon them, when in sin- 
cerely seeking truth they arrive at results which are 
either novel in themselves or in opposition to some 
prevailing opinion. Here again the question is much 
more largely one of manner than of matter. The seri- 
ous, scholarly, and responsible investigator is not a 
demagogue, and demagogues should not be permitted 
to take his name in vain. 

A well-organized group of American youth such as is 
to be found at any college or university of consider- 
able size offers almost irresistible temptation to the 



CRITICISM OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS 159 

propagandist. It seems to the ardent supporter of 
some new movement the most natural thing in the 
world that he should be permitted, in season and out 
of season, to harangue college and university students 
on the subject around which he feels that the whole 
world revolves. Any attempt to protect the students 
or the reputation of a given college or university for 
sobriety and sanity of judgment is forthwith attacked 
as a movement toward the suppression of free speech. 
A portion of the newspaper press and not a few of their 
more constant correspondents are aroused to action, 
and pretty soon there is a full-fledged agitation in 
progress, directed against those responsible for the ad- 
ministration and good order of the college or univer- 
sity in question. In particular, the agitation in favor 
of woman suffrage, and those in favor of what is called 
prohibition or of what is called socialism, are most 
active and determined in seeking to use colleges and 
universities as agencies and instruments of propa- 
ganda. 

It may properly be pointed out that in each of these 
cases, and in others that are similar, there is not and 
cannot be involved any question of free speech in the 
proper sense of that term. There is no good reason 
why the youth who are committed to the care of a col- 
lege or university should be turned over by that col- 
lege or university to any agitators or propagandists 
who may present themselves. On the other hand, 
there is every reason why the college or university 
should protect its students from outside influences of 



160 CRITICISM OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS 

this sort. The sound and proper policy appears to be 
for a college or university to see to it that its students 
receive information and instruction on all of these 
subjects, and on similar matters that interest large 
groups of people, from its own responsible officers of 
instruction or from scholarly experts selected by them 
because of their competence and good sense. For 
many years it has been the rule at Columbia Univer- 
sity, established in 1891, that any bona-fide organiza- 
tion of students interested in a political or social move- 
ment and wishing to organize a club or association in 
support thereof might hold one meeting for organiza- 
tion in the university buildings, but that, so far as 
clubs and associations interested in political or highly 
contentious subjects were concerned, all subsequent 
meetings must be held outside of the university pre- 
cincts. This plan has worked well for nearly twenty- 
five years. The university has been most hospitable to 
clubs and organizations of every sort, provided they 
were organized in good faith by duly registered stu- 
dents. Under the operation of this rule, no serious 
abuses have arisen and no charge has been made, or 
could justly be made, that freedom of speech was in 
any way interfered with or limited. On the other 
hand, the university and its students have been pro- 
tected from constant and persistent agitation, during 
political campaigns in particular, in regard to matters 
that lie quite outside the main business and purpose of 
the university. 



XV 
GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 



From the Annual Report as president of Columbia University, 

June 30, 1917 



• 



GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 

Some years ago the London Spectator invited Lord 
Salisbury, then prime minister, to read to his col- 
leagues in the cabinet the eighteenth chapter of Exo- 
dus, beginning at the thirteenth verse. The writer 
pointed out that in that chapter the true principle of 
civil administration is laid down with a clearness and 
precision which no subsequent writers on public af- 
fairs have ever bettered. The passage in question re- 
lates the visit of Jethro to his son-in-law, Moses, in 
the course of which Jethro observed that the whole of 
Moses' energy was occupied with the details of ad- 
ministration. He therefore felt compelled to protest 
and to ask Moses why he was so continually immersed 
in the details of his work. The answer of Moses was 
not satisfying, and Jethro at once pointed out where 
the weak. spot lay. He said to Moses: "The thing that 
thou doest is not good. Thou wilt surely wear away, 
both thou, and this people that is with thee: for the 
thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to per- 
form it thyself alone." This wise man went on to urge 
that Moses should content himself with laying down 
general principles of action, and that details should be 
left to subordinates. His exact words have not lost 

their consequence: "Thou [Moses] shalt teach them 

163 



1 64 GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 

the statutes and the laws, and shalt show them the 
way wherein they must walk, and the work that they 
must do. . . . And it shall be that every great mat- 
ter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter 
they shall judge themselves; so shall it be easier for 
thyself, and they shall bear the burden with thee." 

More tractable than most sons-in-law, Moses ac- 
cepted the good advice of Jethro, and the record tells 
that in future Moses refrained from interference with 
matters of detail and occupied himself solely with 
those of importance. 

The distinction between government and adminis- 
tration and the principles of good administration could 
not be better stated than by Jethro. Government is 
the establishment of principles, laws, policies, and ad- 
ministration is the carrying out and executing of those 
principles, laws, policies. In Columbia University this 
distinction has been accepted and acted upon with in- 
creasing completeness for thirty years. The records 
of the university make plain that before 1887 or there- 
about, the trustees concerned themselves not only 
with the government of the university but directly 
with its administration. Since July 1, 1887, however, 
and more completely since 1892, the statutes of the 
university have put all initiative and virtually com- 
plete responsibility for the educational policies and 
work of the university in the hands of the university 
council and the several faculties. These bodies are, by 
their nature, legislative, and the execution of the policies 
authorized by them is confided to the president, to 



GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 165 

deans, to directors, to secretaries, and to other appro- 
priate officers of administration. Democracy in gov- 
ernment is understandable and the professed aim and 
faith of most modern men. Democracy in administra- 
tion, however, is a meaningless phrase. There can be 
no democracy in collecting the fares on a street-car, 
or in painting a house, or in writing a letter. Vague 
and inconsequent writers are, nevertheless, in the 
habit of using the nonsensical phrase "democracy in 
administration," apparently without appreciation of 
the fact that the words are literally nonsense. To dis- 
tinguish between government and administration and 
then to establish sound principles of administration 
are no less important now than in the days of Jethro 
and Moses. 

The organization of Columbia University is pre- 
scribed by the charter, but a reading of the charter 
provisions would give no idea of the practical working 
of that organization in the present year of grace. The 
charter gives the trustees full legal power and author- 
ity to direct and prescribe the course of study and the 
discipline to be observed. The trustees have, however, 
by statutes of their own adoption, long since put the 
first of these powers in the hands of the university 
council and of the faculties, and the second in the 
hands of the president, the deans, and the directors. 
There is record of but a single instance since 1892 
where any exercise of the powers so committed to the 
council or the faculties has been amended or rejected 
by the trustees, to whom all such action, if important, 



1 66 GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 

must go for formal approval; and no case of discipline 
has been appealed to the trustees since many years 
before that date. 

The present functions of the trustees, as distinct 
from their legal powers and authority, are to care for 
the property and funds of the corporation, to erect and 
to maintain the buildings necessary for the work of 
the university, and to appropriate annually the sums 
which in their judgment are necessary and expedient 
for the carrying on of the university's work. In ad- 
dition, the trustees select and appoint a president and, 
following the quaint language of the charter, "such 
professor or professors, tutor or tutors to assist the 
president in the government and education of the 
students belonging to the said college, and such other 
officer or officers, as to the said trustees shall seem meet, 
all of whom shall hold their offices during the pleasure 
of the trustees." 

In practice it is only the first of these functions, that 
of caring for the property and funds of the corporation, 
which the trustees perform without consultation with 
other members of the university. In the planning and 
erection of new buildings those individuals or groups of 
individuals who are to occupy and use any given build- 
ing are always consulted as to its plan and arrange- 
ment. For at least twenty-five years no appointment 
to the teaching staff has been made, with two excep- 
tions, save upon the recommendation and advice of 
those members or representatives of the teaching staff 
most immediately interested. The two exceptions were 



GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 167 

cases in which donors of new endowments asked for 
specified appointments to the positions which the en- 
dowments made possible, submitting in each case am- 
ple testimony to the competence of the persons named. 
To all teaching positions below the grade of assistant 
professor, hundreds in number each year, the power of 
appointment is vested in the several faculties. These 
appointments are confirmed as a matter of form by 
the trustees, but there is no record of any such ap- 
pointment having failed of confirmation. It seems 
plain, therefore, that for a quarter of a century the 
practice at Columbia University has been in accord 
with those ideals of university government that put 
the largest possible measure of responsibility and 
power in the hands of the university teachers, and that 
it is probably far in advance of the policy pursued at 
most other universities of rank either in Europe or in 
the United States. 

As the work of university administration becomes 
precise and better organized, it is better done. Funds 
are by no means adequate to permit the institution of 
a thoroughly competent and perfectly organized ad- 
ministrative staff in Columbia University, but so far 
as means will permit the sound principles of adminis- 
tration that have been described are uniformly fol- 
lowed. After a policy has once been formulated and 
adopted by the appropriate legislative university au- 
thority, it is intrusted for execution to an individual. 
That individual is chosen for his known competence in 
the transaction of business and in dealing with men. 



1 68 GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 

Upon him rests the responsibility, easily fixed when 
need be, for the prompt and effective carrying out of 
the measures put in his hands. 

By the provisions of the charter, all officers of ad- 
ministration and instruction are appointed to hold 
their offices during the pleasure of the trustees. Use- 
ful reflection is invited by the question why it should 
usually be considered so normal and so natural for a 
teacher to exercise his pleasure to exchange one aca- 
demic post for another, while so abnormal and so un- 
natural for the governors of an institution of learning 
to exercise their pleasure to substitute a more satis- 
factory individual teacher for a poorer or less satis- 
factory one. It would seem that the phrase "during 
the pleasure of the trustees " opened the way to a ter- 
mination of academic relationship without any neces- 
sary reflection whatever upon the character of the in- 
dividual teacher. Indeed, this is precisely the judicial 
construction that has been given to these words. In 
the case of People ex rel Kelsey v. New York Medical 
School, decided in 1898, the Appellate Division of the 
Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion written by 
Mr. Justice Barrett, used this language in distinguish- 
ing between removal after charges and removal at the 
pleasure of the trustees (Appellate Division Reports, 
New York, 29:247-8): 

The decision of a Board upon charges, after a hearing, cannot 
in any proper sense be deemed a manifestation of its pleasure. 
The power in the one case is absolute, in the other judicial. 



GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 169 

It seems quite reasonable, too, that these alternative powers 
should thus have been conferred. It seems equally reasonable that 
a majority vote should have been deemed sufficient for removal 
at pleasure, while a three-fourths vote should have been required 
for a removal upon charges. When a professor is removed at plea- 
sure, no stigma attaches to the act of removal. His services are no 
longer required and he is told so. That is what in substance such 
a removal amounts to. When he is removed upon charges, how- 
ever, he is sent out into the professional world with a stain upon 
his record. The distinction here is obvious and the intention to 
discriminate, just. If a professor misconducts himself, he may be 
disciplined. The College in that case deems it improper to give 
him an honorable discharge or to permit him to depart with the 
impunity attached to a mere causeless dismissal. If, however, its 
relations with him are severed merely because he is not liked or 
because some one else is preferred, dismissal at pleasure is provided 
for. In the latter case, it is reasonable that the majority in the 
usual way, should govern an act. If the former, it is just that the 
stigma should not be fastened upon the professor without a hear- 
ing and a substantial preponderance in the vote. . . . 

Upon the other hand, the College should not be tied to a par- 
ticular person who, however able and worthy, happens to be 
afflicted with temperamental qualities which render association 
with him disagreeable. There can be no good reason why such a 
person should be permanently inflicted upon his associates, so long 
as he does nothing which renders him amenable to charges. . . . 
The appointment of a professor is not an appointment to office in 
the corporation any more than is the appointment of an instructor. 
It is an appointment which implies contractual relations in some 
form of which the by-law is the foundation. The professor may 
leave at his pleasure; the Board may terminate his professorship 
at its pleasure. If the relator's view be correct, the " pleasure" is 
his and his alone. It would follow that he has an appointment 
which constitutes a unilateral contract of retention at his own 
pleasure for life or during good behavior; in other words, a contract 



170 GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 

which he alone can specifically enforce and which is entirely de- 
pendent upon his individual will. We think this theory is entirely 
unfounded. 

The sound common sense of this judgment cannot be 
gainsaid. It would be little short of a calamity were it 
not possible for an academic teacher to change his 
place of occupation without thereby reflecting upon 
the intelligence or the integrity of those with whom he 
had been associated, and similarly if it became im- 
possible for the governing board of a school system or 
of a school or college to substitute one teacher for an- 
other without bringing charges against the person dis- 
placed. Any contrary theory assumes a pre-estab- 
lished harmony of which not even Leibnitz dreamed 
and a pre-established competence which would render 
it impossible for any one to be appointed to a teaching 
position who was not ipso facto entitled to steady pro- 
motion and increase in compensation and to a lifelong 
tenure. If advancement and success in the teaching 
profession are to depend upon merit and not merely 
upon status, there must be clear thinking and definite 
action in respect to these matters. Security of tenure 
is desirable, but competence and loyalty are more de- 
sirable still, and a secure tenure purchased at the 
price of incompetence and disloyalty must sound a 
death-knell to every educational system or institution 
where it prevails. These are all matters of grave im- 
portance in the government of an educational system 
or an educational institution. They cannot be dis- 
missed with phrases or formulas, but must be met and 



GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 171 

decided in accordance with sound principle and the 
public interest. 

Just as seven cities contended for the birthplace ot 
Homer, so not fewer than seven American academic 
wits are contending for the honor of having originated 
the pungent saying: "Academic freedom means free- 
dom to say what you think without thinking what 
you say." There is no real reason to fear that aca- 
demic freedom, whether so defined or otherwise, is or 
ever has been in the slightest danger in the United 
States. Evidence to the contrary is quite too mani- 
fold and too abundant. What is constantly in danger, 
however, is a just sense of academic obligation. When 
a teacher accepts an invitation to become a member of 
an academic society, he thereupon loses some of the 
freedom that he formerly possessed. He remains, as 
before, subject to the restrictions and the punishments 
of the law; but in addition he has voluntarily accepted 
the restrictions put upon him by the traditions, the 
organization, and the purposes of the institution with 
which he has become associated. Try as he may, he 
can no longer write or speak in his own name alone. 
Were he to succeed in so doing, what he might write 
or say would have, in nine cases out of ten, no sig- 
nificance and no hearing. What he writes or says gains 
significance and a hearing because of the prestige of 
the academic society to which he belongs. To that 
prestige, with all that that word means, the academic 
teacher owes a distinct, a constant, and a compelling 



172 GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 

obligation. To maintain one's connection with an aca- 
demic society while at war with its purposes or disloyal 
to its traditions and organization is neither wise nor 
just. No one is compelled to remain in an academic 
association which he dislikes or which makes him un- 
comfortable. What the ancient Stoic said of life itself 
is true of a university: "The door is always open to 
any one who has an excuse for leaving/' 

On the other hand, academic obligation is reciprocal. 
The academic society of which the individual teacher is 
a member owes to him encouragement, compensation 
as generous as its resources will afford, and protection 
from unfair attack and criticism, as well as from all 
avoidable hamperings and embarrassments in the prose- 
cution of his intellectual work. Each individual mem- 
ber of an academic society is in some degree a keeper of 
that society's conscience and reputation. As such the 
society as a whole must give him support, assistance, 
and opportunity. 

The same type of mind which insists that it knows no 
country but humanity, and that one should aim to be a 
citizen of no state but only of the world, indulges it- 
self in the fiction that one may be disloyal to the aca- 
demic society which he has voluntarily joined, in order 
to show devotion to something that he conceives to 
be higher and of greater value. Both contentions af- 
front common sense and are the result of that muddled 
thinking which to-day is bold enough to misuse the 
noble name of philosophy. One effect of much recent 
teaching of what once was ethics is to weaken all sense 



GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 173 

of obligation of every kind except to one's own ap- 
petites and desire for instant advantage. That eco- 
nomic determinism which is confuted every time a 
human heart beats in sympathy and which all history 
throws to the winds has in recent years obtained 
much influence among those who, for lack of a more 
accurate term, call themselves intellectuals. These are 
for the most part men who know so many things which 
are not so that they make ignorance appear to be 
not only interesting but positively important. The}^ 
abound just now in the lower and more popular forms 
of literary production, and they are not without rep- 
resentation in academic societies. 

The time has not yet come, however, when rational 
persons can contemplate with satisfaction the rule of 
the literary and academic Bolsheviki or permit them 
to seize responsibility for the intellectual life of the 
nation. 

Neglect of one's academic obligation, or carelessness 
regarding it, gives rise to difficult problems. Men of 
mature years who have achieved reputation enough to 
be invited to occupy a post of responsibility in a uni- 
versity ought not to have to be reminded that there is 
such a thing as academic obligation and that they fall 
short in it. It is humiliating and painful to find, with 
increasing frequency and in different parts of the coun- 
try, men in distinguished academic posts who choose 
to act in utter disregard of the plainest dictates of 
ethics and good conduct. It is fortunate indeed that, 
however conspicuous are instances of this disregard, 



174 GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 

they are in reality negligible in number when compared 
with the vast body of loyal, devoted, and scholarly 
American academic teachers. It is noticeable, too, 
that instances of this lack of a sense of obligation 
rarely arise, if ever, in the case of those men whose in- 
tellectual occupations bring them in contact with real 
things. It is only when a man is concerned chiefly 
with opinions and views, and those opinions and views 
of his own making, that he finds and yields to the 
temptation to make his academic association the foot- 
ball of his own ambitions or emotions. 

It is important, too, that academic teachers shall 
not be so absorbed in their own individual work as not 
to give thought and care to the larger problems and 
interests of the academic society to which they belong. 
No part of a university system is without experience 
that is of value in helping to meet satisfactorily the 
questions that arise in other parts. The professor of 
law who is interested in the work of the law school 
alone, or the professor of engineering, of medicine, or of 
classical philology, who cannot find time or induce- 
ment to concern himself with questions affecting the 
entire university, or those parts of it that are foreign 
to his immediate field of interest, is doing only half 
his academic duty. No formula can be suggested for 
improving these conditions. They will be removed 
only by patiently pointing out, year after year, what 
the words obligation, loyalty, and duty mean, and by 
refusing to let them all be transmuted either into labels 
for ancient superstitions or names for various forms 



GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 175 

of personal advantage. In order to keep confidence 
in the ultimate achievement of a university's aim, and 
in order to avoid discouragement at the slow progress 
that is making, one may take comfort in the saga- 
cious saying of Schiller: "Let no man measure by a 
scale of perfection the meagre product of reality." 

One of the unsatisfactory aspects of the relations be- 
tween the individual teacher and his college or uni- 
versity lies in the procedure, or rather lack of pro- 
cedure, that is followed when a person teaching in one 
institution is sought by the authorities of another. It 
appears to give some teachers no qualms of conscience 
to receive and to consider an invitation from another 
institution without discussing this with colleagues or 
administrative authorities of the institution which they 
are serving, or even without revealing it to them. In 
fact, there is a certain surreptitiousness about the 
tendering and accepting invitations to pass from one 
college or university to another that is not creditable 
either to those who tender the invitations or to those 
who receive and either accept or reject them. A high 
standard of professional honor and professional obliga- 
tion would seem to require that an institution which 
wishes to tender an invitation to an officer of profes- 
sorial rank elsewhere, should advise the president of the 
sister institution of that fact; and similarly that when 
it is desired to tender an invitation to an officer of less 
than professorial rank, advice of that fact should be 
sent to the head of the department of the college or 



176 GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 

university in which the person in question is serving. 
Academic officers are very quick to resent being in- 
vited to withdraw from service, no matter how serious 
the reason, but many of them have no compunctions 
whatever in deserting their assigned work on short 
notice, or on no notice at all, in order either to accept 
service in another institution, or to enter upon a prof- 
itable business undertaking, or to give expression to 
their emotions. There can be no serious standards of 
professional conduct in the calling of academic teacher 
until matters like these are regarded as important and 
are given their place as controlling influences in shap- 
ing conduct. 



XVI 
MAKING LIBERAL MEN AND WOMEN 



From the Annual Report as president of Columbia University, 

June 30, 1920 



MAKING LIBERAL MEN AND WOMEN 

Few things are more noticeable in much current 
writing and discussion than the twisting of well-known 
terms from their accustomed meanings. This twisting 
is quite often done consciously and for purposes of 
propaganda. Perhaps no word in the English language 
has suffered more from this ill treatment than the fine 
word liberal. The historic and familiar significance of 
this term is that which is worthy of a free man, of one 
who is open-minded and candid, of one who is open to 
the reception of new ideas. In this sense the thought 
which lies behind the word liberal has dominated 
every really progressive theory of education from the 
time of Plato to the present day. Just now, however, 
the word liberal is widely used as though it were sy- 
nonymous with queer, odd, unconventional, otherwise- 
minded, in perpetual opposition. There was a time 
when in the neighborhood of Boston the test of liber- 
alism was the rejection of the Andover Creed, and 
possibly the rejection of the Apostles' Creed itself. 
Many would include among liberals those who favor 
all sorts of social, industrial, and governmental tyr- 
anny, which are by their very nature incompatible with 
liberty. An enemy of the family and an experimenter 
with what is called trial marriage is now called a 
liberal. The person who would destroy government 

and substitute for the political state of free men a 

179 



180 MAKING LIBERAL MEN AND WOMEN 

close-working combination of industrial autocracies is 
called a liberal. One who sneers at the religious faith 
or the political convictions of others, and takes care 
that his attitude is publicly advertised, is called a lib- 
eral. Under such circumstances it is plainly necessary 
to look to one's definitions. The aim of the school, the 
college, and the university has often been described as 
that of making liberal-minded men and women; but 
surely this need not be interpreted to include freaks, 
oddities, revolutionaries, and those whose conduct 
carries them close to the border-line which, if crossed, 
would require them to be put in confinement in the in- 
terest of social welfare and social safety. 

The truly liberal man or woman will be self-dis- 
ciplined, and will aim to make knowledge the foundation 
of wisdom, to base conduct upon fixed character, and 
to maintain an even temper at difficult times. Con- 
sidering the conditions of the time in which they lived, 
the ancient Stoics give us some admirable examples of 
what is truly meant by a liberal. We cannot afford to 
let this word be lost or to have it stolen before our eyes. 
Its application should be denied to those individuals 
and those traits for which it is wrongly claimed, and 
its true definition and use should be insisted upon 
everywhere and at all times. Otherwise, we shall have 
to find some other definition of the aim of education 
than that of making liberal men and women. 

It would be idle to ignore the fact that there is wide- 
spread public dissatisfaction with the results of present- 
day education. Horace Greeley's famous classification 



MAKING LIBERAL MEN AND WOMEN 181 

of college graduates with horned cattle is too often 
quoted with approving sarcasm. The mounting cost of 
education, both tax-supported and other, and its di- 
verse competing forms are increasingly attracting un- 
favorable public attention and increasingly arousing 
sharp public criticism. The qualifications of those who 
teach are not always spoken of with approbation. In 
the past it has been usual to assume that whatever is 
done in the name of education, like that which is done 
in the name of philanthropy or religion, is of necessity 
well and deservingly done and is to be supported with- 
out murmur. There are, however, too many signs that 
education does not satisfactorily educate to justify or 
even to insure a longer continuance of this uncritical 
acquiescence. What is the trouble ? 

Perhaps a hint of where to look for an answer may 
be found in the remark of an undergraduate who had 
been in attendance upon a lecture by one of the fore- 
most living authorities in his field. "A very scholarly 
lecture," the undergraduate was heard to say as the 
audience passed out, but his tone was one of distinct 
protest that he had spent his time in listening to schol- 
arship. Scholarship, it must be confessed, is not pop- 
ular in America, and what is blithely referred to as the 
revolt against intellectualism is, in last analysis, noth- 
ing more or less than the revolt against the influence 
of those who know. It is the passionate cry of ig- 
norance for power. A casual impression gained from 
the reading of some hopelessly befogged magazine or 
from some haphazard newspaper headline, or a re- 



182 MAKING LIBERAL MEN AND WOMEN 

sponse to some emotional "urge" — the newest name 
for appetite — is greatly preferred to real knowledge. 
The ruling passion just now is not to know and to un- 
derstand, but to get ahead, to overturn something, to 
apply in ways that bring material advantage some bit 
of information or some acquired skill. Both school and 
college have in large part taken their minds off the true 
business of education, which is to prepare youth to live, 
and have fixed them upon something which is very 
subordinate, namely, how to prepare youth to make a 
living. This is all part and parcel of the prevailing 
tendency to measure everything in terms of self-in- 
terest. Economic explanations of the conduct of in- 
dividuals, of groups, and of nations — that is, explana- 
tions based upon desire for gain or love of power — are 
sought rather than explanations based upon intellec- 
tual or ethical foundations. But a civilization based 
upon self-interest rather than upon intellectual 'and 
moral principle would swiftly lapse into the barbarism 
out of which it has come. An educational system 
based upon self-interest is not worthy the support and 
the sacrifice of a civilized people. I 

We are doubtless passing through a period of reac- 
tion in education which will spend itself as periods of 
reaction have so often spent themselves before. The 
sure mark of a real reactionary is his contempt for all 
that man has learned and done, and his demand that 
the history of human achievement be thrown away 
and the task begun all over again on the basis of pres- 
ent-day dissatisfaction and distress. The sure mark 



MAKING LIBERAL MEN AND WOMEN 183 

of the true progressive is his acceptance of human ex- 
perience, his desire to understand and to interpret it, 
and his determination that it shall be made the foun- 
dation for something better, something happier, and 
something more just than anything which has gone 
before. 

The underlying condition essential to human happi- 
ness is progress in the power to produce. Unless that 
power to produce is the outgrowth of understanding, 
of mastery of principles, of knowledge of past achieve- 
ment, and of insight into high and lasting purpose, it 
will not accomplish anything desirable or permanent. 
For a quarter century past American educational prac- 
tice has been steadily losing its hold upon guiding 
principle and has, therefore, increasingly come to float 
and drift about upon the tide of mere opinion, without 
standards, without purpose, and without insight. The 
little red schoolhouse of the generation that followed 
the Civil War, with its wretchedly poor equipment but 
with an earnest and devoted teacher who laid stress 
upon character-building and upon the fundamentals of 
intellectual training, did more for the American peo- 
ple than does many a costly and well-equipped edu- 
cational palace such as may be seen in any part of the 
United States to-day. It is as discouraging as it is 
startling to find Henry James, so lately as 1913, de- 
scribing the college town which he knew best as "ut- 
terly arid and vacuous." 

This decline in educational power is primarily the 
result of a widely influential and wholly false philosophy 



1 84 MAKING LIBERAL MEN AND WOMEN 

of education which has operated to destroy the excel- 
lence of the American school and college, as these ex- 
isted a generation ago, without putting anything in its 
place. It has been dinned into our ears that all sub- 
jects are of equal educational value, and that it matters 
not what one studies, but only how he studies it. This 
doctrine has destroyed the standard of value in educa- 
tion, and in practical application is making us a widely 
instructed but an uncultivated and undisciplined peo- 
ple. We are now solemnly adjured that children, how- 
ever 3/^oung, must not be guided or disciplined by their 
elders, but that they must be permitted to give full 
and free expression to their own individuality, which 
can of course only mean their own utter emptiness. 
In education as in physics, nature abhors a vacuum. 
Were such a theory as that to become dominant for any 
length of time, the whole world would thereby be sen- 
tenced to remain forever in the incompetence and im- 
maturity of childhood. No generation would be helped 
or permitted to stand on the shoulders of its prede- 
cessors, or to add something to what they had already 
gained. Life would then be merely an everlasting be- 
ginning, devoid of accomplishment and without other 
aim than the multiplication of nervous reactions to a 
variety of accidental and rapidly succeeding stimuli. 
The much despised to re'Xo? is essential to any move- 
ment that is progress; anything else is mere intellectual, 
social, and political wriggling. 

With the decline of genuine educational guidance 
and helpful discipline there has gone an increasingly 



MAKING LIBERAL MEN AND WOMEN 185 

vigorous warfare on excellence and distinction of every 
kind, which is truly pathetic in its destructiveness. 
Youth are told that they must exert themselves and 
excel, but if they chance to take this advice and suc- 
ceed they are then pointed to as the evil products of a 
harmful and ill-organized social system. So long ago 
as October 31, 1888, Professor Goldwin Smith, an in- 
veterate liberal and a keen observer of his kind, wrote 
to Mrs. Humphry Ward: "Over the intellectual dead- 
level of this democracy opinion courses like the tide 
running in over a flat." Under such conditions the 
mob spirit becomes increasingly powerful. The dema- 
gogue, the persistent and plausible self-seeker, and 
those who possess or can command the large sums of 
money needed to advertise themselves throughout the 
land, occupy the largest place in the public eye and 
actually come to think of themselves and be thought 
of as representative Americans. It is not surprising 
that at least three-fourths of the best ability and best 
character in the United States remains in hiding, so 
far as public knowledge and public service are con- 
cerned. 

It is significant, too, that in this period of vigorous 
and able-bodied reaction the world should be without 
a poet, without a philosopher, and without a notable 
religious leader. The great voices of the spirit are all 
stilled just now, while the mad passion for gain and 
for power endeavors to gratify itself through the odd 
device of destroying what has already been gained or 
accomplished. 



186 MAKING LIBERAL MEN AND WOMEN 

To get back upon the path of constructive progress 
will be a long and difficult task. A first step will be to 
bring back the elementary school to its own proper 
business. The elementary school being universal, 
well-organized, and easily accessible, has been seized 
upon by faddists and enthusiasts of every type as an 
instrumentality not for better education, but for ac- 
complishing their own particular ends. The simple 
business of training young children in good habits of 
diet and exercise and conduct; of teaching them the 
elementary facts of the nature which surrounds them 
and of the society of which they form a part; and of 
giving them ability to read understandingly, to write 
legibly, and to perform quickly and with accuracy the 
fundamental operations with numbers, has been pushed 
into the background by all sorts of enterprises that 
have their origin in emotionalism, in ignorance, or in 
mere vanity. Through lack of knowledge of educa- 
tional values, and their fear of an uninformed public 
opinion, the secondary schools and the colleges have 
very largely abdicated their place as leaders in modern 
life and have become the plaything of whatever tem- 
porary and passing influences may operate upon them. 
In the hope of becoming popular they have thrown 
overboard principle. Throughout elementary school, 
high school, and college, teachers are too often not 
teachers at all, but preachers or propagandists for some 
doctrine of their own liking. One would think that 
the business of teaching was sufficiently simple and 
sufficiently important to be kept unconfused with other 



MAKING LIBERAL MEN AND WOMEN 187 

forms of influence; but such has not been the case. 
Very many teachers are preachers or propagandists 
first and teachers afterward. 

It is in conditions like these that one must look for 
an explanation of the costly ineffectiveness which is so 
sharply charged against present-day education in the 
United States. We are told that boys and girls, young 
men and young women, spend years apparently in 
study and then leave school or college without a trained 
intelligence, without any standards of appreciation in 
art or in morals, with wretched manners, with slovenly 
speech, and without capacity to approach a new prob- 
lem dispassionately or to reason about it clearly. It 
is asserted that we devote untold skill and labor to the 
teaching of French, of Spanish, and of German, and 
yet the high-school or college graduate who can speak 
or write any one of these languages correctly and 
freely, or read them save with difficulty, is rare in- 
deed; that for fifty years we have poured out money 
without stint for the teaching of the natural and ex- 
perimental sciences, and have provided costly labora- 
tories and collections to make that teaching practical, 
yet the result, so far as giving a general command of 
scientific method or general knowledge of scientific 
facts is concerned, is quite negligible; that school and 
college students spend years upon the study of history 
and yet few really know any history; that these stu- 
dents are uniformly taught to read and are guided to- 
ward reading that which is worth while, yet it is clear 
that the greater part of their reading is of that which 



188 MAKING LIBERAL MEN AND WOMEN 

is unworthy to be read. More criticism than was ever 
levelled against the study of Latin, Greek, and mathe- 
matics based upon the meagre practical results ob- 
tained can be repeated with equal force against those 
newer subjects of school and college study which have 
so largely displaced Latin, Greek, and mathematics. 

In Columbia College a definite and well-considered 
attempt is making to overcome these unfortunate con- 
ditions of modern education, and to build a wise, 
judicious, and truly educational programme of study 
upon a sound foundation. This foundation is provided 
by the course entitled Introduction to Contemporary 
Civilization, prescribed for all members of the fresh- 
man class, and given five times weekly throughout 
freshman year. The purpose of this course is to give 
the student early in his college residence a body of ob- 
jective material upon which to base his own later and 
more advanced studies and his own judgments con- 
cerning the world in which he lives. A result of pre- 
scribing this course for all freshmen is to make sure 
that every student in Columbia College has a common 
starting-point and a single point of vantage from which 
to study, to understand, and to appreciate the world 
of nature and of man. It is significant, too, that in 
this course the student is brought at once face to face 
with real interests and with genuine problems as they 
exist to-day. These interests and these problems are 
then placed in their historic setting, the story of their 
development is traced, and they are analyzed into their 
simplest parts. The large measure of success that has 



MAKING LIBERAL MEN AND WOMEN 189 

attended the introduction of this course, and the great 
interest taken in it by the undergraduates themselves, 
indicate that the faculty of Columbia College is on the 
right track, and that it seems likely to do its full part 
in rescuing American college education from the re- 
proach that is so often heaped upon it, sometimes per- 
haps unjustly, but too frequently with a measure of 
justice that we cannot refuse to recognize. 

The college faculty has gone farther and in establish- 
ing a special course of reading, to be followed through 
two years by candidates for general honors, has re- 
corded its conviction that the college graduate may 
properly be held to some knowledge of the master- 
pieces in literature, in poetry, in history, in philosophy, 
and in science. The reading-list at present given to 
candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with gen- 
eral honors includes: Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, 
iEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, 
Aristotle, Lucretius, Horace, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, 
St. Augustine, 'The Nibelungenlied," 'The Song of 
Roland," St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Petrarch, Mon- 
taigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Francis Bacon, Milton, 
Moliere, David Hume, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rous- 
seau, Adam Smith, Lessing, Kant, Schiller, Goethe, 
Macaulay, Victor Hugo, Hegel, Darwin, Lyell, Tolstoi, 
Nietzsche. 

This provides a rich feast of reason, and if it is want- 
ing in any respect it is in not sufficiently representing 
the fine arts, other than poetry, which have in every 
age been the finest flower of a people's aspiration. 



XVII 
THE NEW PAGANISM 



From the Annual Report as president of Columbia University, 

June 30, 1920 



THE NEW PAGANISM 

Every conceivable explanation of unrest, dissatisfac- 
tion, and disorder that prevail throughout the world 
has been proposed except the one which is probably the 
deepest and most important. For between two hun- 
dred and three hundred years the modern world has 
been in a state of intellectual upheaval, although there 
are those who think that this condition began with the 
World War or was caused by it. This upheaval has 
grown constantly more wide-spread and more severe. 
The forces that lie behind it have profoundly affected 
the religious life and the religious faith of great masses 
of men, have shaken their confidence in age-old prin- 
ciples of private morals and of public policy, and have 
left them blindly groping for guiding principles to take 
the place of those that have lost their hold. A genera- 
tion ago John Fiske, in one of his luminous essays, 
pointed out that a necessary effect of the Copernican 
theory of the universe was to make the earth and its 
inhabitants seem so small and insignificant as to be 
quite unimportant in the scheme of things and to 
transfer the centre of gravity of man's interest to suns 
and worlds far more vast and far more important than 
ours. While the Copernican theory may logically 
seem to have required this result, what has happened 
is quite different. Man's attention and interest have 
been increasingly turned to himself, his immediate sur- 

193 



194 THE NEW PAGANISM 

roundings, and his instant occupation. Having come 
to feel himself quite superior to all that has gone 
before, and being without faith in anything that lies 
beyond, he has tended to become an extreme egotist. 
The natural result has been to measure the universe 
in terms of himself and his present satisfactions. His 
own emotions and his own appetites, being present and 
immediate, take precedence in the shaping of conduct 
and of policy over any body of principles built up by 
the experience of others. The wisdom, the justice, the 
morality of an act or policy are then tested solely by 
its immediate results, and these results are increasingly 
measured in terms of the material and emotional satis- 
factions of the moment. 

In a world so constituted and so motived, unrest, 
dissatisfaction, and disorder are a necessity. Set free 
a million or a thousand million wills to work each for 
the accomplishment of its own immediate material 
satisfactions, and nothing but unrest, dissatisfaction, 
and disorder is possible. 

What appears to have happened is that in setting 
free the individual human being from those external 
restraints and compulsions which constitute tyranny, 
he has also been set free from those internal restraints 
and compulsions which distinguish liberty from license. 
The pendulum has swung too far. The time has come, 
the time is indeed already past, when the pendulum 
should begin its swing backward toward the middle 
point of wisdom, of sanity, of self-control, and of 
steady progress. 



THE NEW PAGANISM 195 

There is no man, there is no people, without a God. 
That God may be a visible idol, carved of wood or 
stone, to which sacrifice is offered in the forest, in the 
temple, or in the market-place; or it may be an invisi- 
ble idol, fashioned in a man's own image and wor- 
shipped ardently at his own personal shrine. Some- 
where in the universe there is that in which each 
individual has firm faith, and on which he places 
steady reliance. The fool who says in his heart 
"There is no God," really means there is no God but 
himself. His supreme egotism, his colossal vanity, 
have placed him at the centre of the universe which is 
thereafter to be measured and dealt with in terms of 
his personal satisfactions. So it has come to pass 
that after nearly two thousand years much of the 
world resembles the Athens of St. Paul's time, in that 
it is wholly given to idolatry; but in the modern case 
there are as many idols as idol-worshippers, and every 
such idol-worshipper finds his idol in the looking-glass. 
The time has come once again to repeat and to ex- 
pound in thunderous tones the noble sermon of St. 
Paul on Mars Hill, and to declare to these modern 
idolaters "Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, 
Him declare I unto you." 

There can be no cure for the world's ills and no 
abatement of the world's discontents until faith and 
the rule of everlasting principle are again restored 
and made supreme in the life of men and of nations. 
These millions of man-made gods, these myriads of 
personal idols, must be broken up and destroyed, and 



1 96 THE NEW PAGANISM 

the heart and mind of man brought back to a com- 
prehension of the real meaning of faith and its place 
in life. This cannot be done by exhortation or by 
preaching alone. It must be done also by teaching; 
careful, systematic, rational teaching, that will show 
in a simple language, which the uninstructed can 
understand, what are the essentials of a permanent 
and lofty morality, of a stable and just social order, 
and of a secure and sublime religious faith. 

Here we come upon the whole great problem of 
national education, its successes and its disappoint- 
ments, its achievements and its problems yet un- 
solved. Education is not merely instruction — far from 
it. It is the leading of the youth out into a compre- 
hension of his environment, that, comprehending, he 
may so act and so conduct himself as to leave the 
world better and happier for his having lived in it. 
This environment is not by any means a material 
thing alone. It is material of course, but, in addition, 
it is intellectual, it is spiritual. The youth who is led 
to an understanding of nature and of economics and 
left blind and deaf to the appeals of literature, of art, 
of morals, and of religion, has been shown but a part 
of that great environment which is his inheritance as 
a human being. The school and the college do much, 
but the school and the college cannot do all. Since 
Protestantism broke up the solidarity of the ecclesi- 
astical organization in the Western world, and since 
democracy made intermingling of state and church 
impossible, it has been necessary, if religion is to be 



THE NEW PAGANISM 197 

saved for men, that the family and the church do their 
vital co-operative part in a national organization of 
educational effort. The school, the family, and the 
church are three co-operating educational agencies, 
each of which has its weight of responsibility to bear. 
If the family be weakened in respect of its moral and 
spiritual basis, or if the church be neglectful of its 
obligation to offer systematic, continuous, and con- 
vincing religious instruction to the young who are 
within its sphere of influence, there can be no hope 
for a Christian education or for the powerful perpetu- 
ation of the Christian faith in the minds and lives of 
the next generation and those immediately to follow. 
We are trustees of a great inheritance. If we abuse or 
neglect that trust we are responsible before Almighty 
God for the infinite damage that will be done in the 
life of individuals and of nations. 

The contacts and associations of civilized men are 
many and various. The two contacts and associa- 
tions that have been most lasting and most influential 
are those which constitute the state and the church. 
The state is the expression of man's ability to co- 
operate with his fellows in establishing law, in pre- 
serving order, and, as the generations pass, in pro- 
tecting the opportunity of each individual to achieve 
and to enjoy liberty. The church is the expression of 
man's desire to co-operate in worship of the object of 
his faith. Both state and church have a long and 
familiar history, and there is no need to recount any 
part of it here. Of the other contacts and associations 



198 TEE NEW PAGANISM 

of men, none is likely to be considered more important 
than that which has for its purpose the conservation, 
the advancement, and the dissemination of knowledge, 
together with the pursuit of truth, upon which activity 
all knowledge depends for its vital power. When men 
are sufficiently convinced that the pursuit of truth is 
an object worthy of their lifelong endeavor, the uni- 
versity as we now know it comes into existence as both 
the voice and the symbol of this form of human activ- 
ity. When men associate together in pursuit of truth, 
their ruling thought is not agreement, but truth as 
each finds and interprets it. For this reason there will 
be in the university nothing which approaches agree- 
ment or unity as to matters of politics or religion 
beyond the fact that honest and sincere men are pro- 
tected in their right to hold such political and religious 
views as they may choose, provided only that these 
are consistent with the pursuit of truth itself and with 
the welfare and usefulness of the particular society of 
scholars to which they belong. With all the good-will 
in the world toward an individual who might dissent 
from the multiplication table or insist that he had 
solved the problem of perpetual motion, the teachers 
of mathematics and of physics would not be able to 
find a place for him in their teaching ranks. Some- 
where in the fields of religion and politics a similar 
line is to be drawn, but it is difficult to find, and still 
more difficult to apply if found. 

There is no recognized doctrine of human liberty 
which extends to the individual the unchallenged right 



THE NEW PAGANISM 199 

to take his own life. If he attempts it he is forcibly 
prevented, and if he attempts it and fails, he is pun- 
ished. What is true of an individual is true likewise 
of men's associations in the state and in the church. 
There comes a time when dissent takes on the form of 
suicide or assault with intent to kill, and when, there- 
fore, it is prevented and punished. The philosophical 
basis for this is clear enough. There can be no serious 
discussion of truth and no sincere attempt to answer 
the question of jesting Pilate, unless it be assumed 
that there is such a thing as truth to be pursued, and, 
if possible, found. When found and demonstrated, 
truth is to be recognized and acted upon. It will not 
do for some one else to say that he has a wholly con- 
trary conception of truth, or that truth for him means 
something quite other than truth for any one else. 
Some forms of this genially inconsequent doctrine are 
just now enjoying a certain short-lived popularity 
based upon a false psychology and a grievous travesty 
on philosophy, but their irrationality and the im- 
morality of conduct based upon them are so obvious 
that their life is certain to be short. 

Underlying the organization of the university, then, 
there is a certain general, very general, agreement on a 
series of fundamental assumptions as to the state and 
the church; Columbia University, for instance, is both 
American and Christian. Unless a university entirely 
abandons its own peculiar aim and becomes merely an 
instrument of propaganda for some specific doctrine, it 
cannot in its institutional capacity properly go beyond 



200 THE NEW PAGANISM 

this and be drawn into either political or religious 
controversy. Its individual members, be they few or 
many, will follow the guidance of their several heads 
and hearts in seeking or accepting political and reli- 
gious associations and in advancing specific political or 
religious doctrines; but they will not, indeed they 
cannot, thereby commit the university to their own 
convictions or beliefs. 

It must be borne in mind, then, that any member of 
a university who does his duty as he sees it in citizen- 
ship and in the religious life is doing it solely as an 
individual, and that his university relationship or ac- 
tivity is in no wise affected thereby. This is a hard 
lesson for some observers of contemporary life to learn. 
They do not seem able to understand how it is that 
one individual may have a variety of human associa- 
tions and yet not commit them all to his own course 
in relation to any one of them. Clear thinking will 
distinguish between men's different associations, and it 
will be able to render unto Caesar the things which 
are Caesar's, and to render unto God the things which 
are God's. 



XVIII 
THE BUILDING OF CHARACTER 



Address at opening of one hundred and fifty-second academic 
year, September 27, 1905 



THE BUILDING OF CHARACTER 

My first word to the members of the university, 
young and old, must be welcome; welcome to a new 
year of work, of growth, and of service. Illness and 
death have brought us pain and grief since we parted 
for the summer recess, and we stand to-day in the 
shadow of our heavy and latest sorrow. We cherish 
the memory and the example of those who have gone 
from us, and for those who are ill we earnestly wish a 
speedy and complete recovery to health and strength. 

Many of you are here for the first time, and we older 
friends and colleagues understand full well the thrill of 
pride and enthusiasm that accompanies the conscious- 
ness that you have voluntarily associated yourselves 
with one of the world's recognized centres of power. 
Each year will find you more appreciative of what 
Columbia has been and is, and of what Columbia is 
steadily coming to be. And as the true significance of 
the university grows clearer, you will gain new joy 
and happiness from sharing in some measure its glory 
and its fame. 

May I detain you a moment to point out one fun- 
damental fact ? Diverse as our intellectual interests 
here are, and various as are our daily tasks, there is 
one aim which all faculties and schools, all teachers 
and scholars, have in common — the building of char- 
acter. Whether we pursue the older liberal studies or 

203 



204 THE BUILDING OF CHARACTER 

the newer applications of knowledge or some one of 
the learned professions, we are all concerned, first and 
foremost, with the forming of those traits and habits 
which together constitute character. If we fail in this 
all our learning is an evil. 

Just now the American people are receiving some 
painful lessons in practical ethics. They are having 
brought home to them, with severe emphasis, the dis- 
tinction between character and reputation. A man's 
true character, it abundantly appears, may be quite in 
conflict with his reputation, which is the public esti- 
mate of him. Of late we have been watching reputa- 
tions melt away like snow before the sun; and the sun 
in this case is publicity. Men who for years have 
been trusted implicitly by their fellows and so placed 
in positions of honor and grave responsibility are seen 
to be mere reckless speculators with the money of 
others and petty pilferers of the savings of the poor 
and needy. With all this shameful story spread before 
us it takes some courage to follow Emerson's advice 
not to bark against the bad, but rather to chant the 
beauty of the good. 

Put bluntly, the situation which confronts Ameri- 
cans to-day is due to lack of moral principle. New 
statutes may be needed, but statutes will not put 
moral principle where it does not exist. The greed 
for gain and the greed for power have blinded men to 
the time-old distinction between right and wrong. 
Both among business men and at the bar are to be 
found advisers, counted shrewd and successful, who 



THE BUILDING OF CHARACTER 205 

have substituted the penal code for the moral law as 
the standard of conduct. Right and wrong have 
given way to the subtler distinction between legal, 
not-illegal, and illegal; or better, perhaps, between 
honest, law-honest, and dishonest. This new triumph 
of mind over morals is bad enough in itself; but when, 
in addition, its exponents secure material gain and 
professional prosperity, it becomes a menace to our 
integrity as a people. 

Against this casuistry of the counting-house and of 
the law-office, against this subterfuge and deceit, real 
character will stand like a rock. This university, and 
all universities, in season and out of season, must keep 
clearly in view before themselves and the public the 
real meaning of character, and they must never tire 
of preaching that character and character alone makes 
knowledge, skill, and wealth a help rather than a harm 
to those who possess them and to the community as a 
whole. 



XIX 
WORTHY COMPANIONSHIP 



Address at opening of the one hundred and fifty-ninth 
academic year, September 25, 1912 



WORTHY COMPANIONSHIP 

When we assemble the university on each recurring 
commencement day, it is natural for us to look back 
at what has been accomplished in the year that has 
passed. When we assemble the university on the 
opening day of a new academic year, it is equally 
natural to look forward with hope and anticipation to 
the new paths that are opening out before us. To 
such a new year, the one hundred and fifty-ninth in 
the history of Columbia, I offer a cordial and heartfelt 
welcome both to the scholars who teach and to the 
scholars who learn, to those who have returned to a 
place that is already familiar and beloved, and to 
those who join us for the first time. We shall at 
once start each upon his separate way, but we shall be 
animated throughout the year by a common purpose 
and by a common love and loyalty to the university 
which includes us all and which alone make possible 
the rich and helpful opportunities that are offered 
to us. 

Let us each resolve during the academic year now 
opening to strengthen and make firmer our hold upon 
something that really lasts, something that is worth 
while, something that is raised above the temporary 
turmoils and vulgar self-seeking of the day. Let us 

close our ears, so far as possible, to the roar of malice, 

209 



210 WORTHY COMPANIONSHIP 

untruthfulness, and slander that fills the air of this 
year of grace. 

There is one word of counsel that I offer to each 
member of this university, whatever his field of study 
and whatever his chief intellectual occupation. Re- 
solve to pass the year in company with some one high 
and noble character that has left a mark on the world 
and set a standard which is at once an invitation and 
an inspiration. Doubtless many such suggest them- 
selves; but, to be concrete and specific, I will name 
some that occur to me as of particular significance and 
interest just now. 

Let the year be made noteworthy, for example, by 
passing it in company with the poetry of Alfred Tenny- 
son, a poet who will one day be even more highly 
appreciated than at present, not only for the sweet- 
ness of his song, but for the scope and profundity of 
his thought. Do not read at the poetry of Tennyson, 
do not read about the poetry of Tennyson, but read 
the poetry of Tennyson itself. Commit to memory 
some of those passages which are at once a comfort 
and a delight to all intelligent persons. 

Or, if in another mood, pass the year in close and 
familiar company with the Essays of Emerson. Learn 
from him the difference between gold and dross. 
Learn from him the secret of the perpetual move- 
ment of the spirit and the secret of the making of 
standards. Let him teach you how to think about 
things that matter. Go with him along the bypaths 
of reflection until you become familiar and in love with 



WORTHY COMPANIONSHIP 211 

some of the most charming nooks and crannies into 
which real thought penetrates. 

Or, again, if thirsting for the companionship of a life 
of action and of service, driven by the motive power of 
high purpose and a moral ideal, spend the year with 
that masterpiece of biography, Lord Morley's Life of 
Gladstone. In those volumes you may watch the 
growth of a powerful mind and a strong character 
through contact with great problems and large ideals. 
You may witness a course of education in public 
affairs through association with genuine problems, 
with real public interests, and with the highest con- 
ceptions of a nation's service. 

A fourth suggestion occurs to me. The nineteenth 
century left no nobler or inspiring life than that of 
Pasteur. Perhaps you may prefer to pass the year in 
company with that life as told by Vallery-Radot. The 
history of scientific inquiry contains nothing more full 
of suggestion and more abundant in conquests than 
the story of the life of this greatest of modern French- 
men. From that story you may learn the real mean- 
ing of the words scientific method. From that story 
you may learn the real meaning of the conception of 
science in the service of public weal. 

Whether you choose as your companion of this year 
the poetry of Tennyson, or the Essays of Emerson, or 
the Life of Gladstone, or the Life of Pasteur, you will 
have an association never to be forgotten. From this 
companionship you will gain a centre point about 
which to organize your own personal academic studies. 



212 WORTHY COMPANIONSHIP 

From it you will get a keystone for the arch that you 
are hoping to build. From it you will get a sense of 
achievement and of worth that will contribute power- 
fully to your intellectual and moral growth as a human 
being. 



XX 

REASONABLENESS 



Address at opening of one hundred and sixty-third academic 
year, September 27, 191 6 



REASONABLENESS 

One of the chief purposes for which a university 
exists is thrown into strong relief by the happenings 
that are taking place round about us on every side. 
A university aims to exhibit and to teach reasonable- 
ness. It aims to exhibit and to teach orderly and 
judicious examination of facts and of arguments. It 
is averse to the use of force where reason should rule, 
and it deplores the overruling of reason by force. 
Just now force is regnant, or is aiming to ascend the 
throne of power, wherever one looks. In the relations 
between nations, in the carrying forward of our social 
and industrial life, and even in the dealings of one 
individual with another, we are being treated to un- 
usually numerous and unusually distressing examples 
of the use of force. "Force," said Joubert, "rules 
the world until Right is ready." A true university 
will labor in season and out of season to make the 
world ready and willing for the rule of right. 

A university must exhibit and teach reasonableness. 
Reasonableness is more than rationality; it is more 
than the rule of reason. Reasonableness is a quality 
of temper as well as of intellect. It implies the con- 
trol of passion and emotion by reason, not as an 
occasional or unusual act, but as a general habit and 
type of character. The university calls to each one 

215 



216 REASONABLENESS 

of us, teachers and students alike, to cultivate reason- 
ableness, open-mindedness, gentleness, and kindliness 
of feeling, and the endeavor to escape from the mere 
rule of force or from the adoration of physical and 
material power. If we make this coming year a year 
of growth in reasonableness We shall have done, each 
one of us, what we can to fulfil one of the high aims 
for which this university exists. 



XXI 

STEADFAST IN THE FAITH 



Address delivered in St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University, 
November 28, 1917 



STEADFAST IN THE FAITH 

The revolving year brings us again to the eve of 
Thanksgiving. This glad festival, to which we are 
summoned by the President of the United States in 
compelling words, is a notable happening in our na- 
tional life. For generations it has taken the place of 
the ancient festival of harvest-home, and has served 
as an invitation and as an opportunity to give thanks 
to Almighty God for His blessings and His benefits. 

One may ask, as each year follows in the steps of 
those that have gone before, what is it that we shall 
just now be thankful for? What is it that we shall 
just now single out for emphasis in our own thinking 
and in our own worship ? Is it carnage ? Is it de- 
struction ? Is it infinite loss of life and toilsomely 
acquired property and opportunity ? Is it a harvest 
of hate ? No, it is none of these things. We could 
not be thankful for them, for any one of them, and 
hold our heads erect as sincere and God-fearing men 
and women. 

We must, members of the university, look beneath 

the surface and find something there revealed to our 

vision which shall, like Thanksgiving day itself, not 

only invite but compel our thankfulness. What is it ? 

Is it not the vision to see, the will to decide, the power 

to execute, and the steadfastness to continue in the 

faith and the power of the everlasting principles of 

219 



220 STEADFAST IN THE FAITH 

human justice and human liberty ? Suppose that 
there had been no people with this faith and this will 
and this power; suppose that the whole world, with 
all of its accumulations and all of its opportunities, 
had been left undefended, to be preyed upon by the 
forces of destruction, what would have been the sub- 
ject of Thanksgiving day for our children ? It might 
have been that they would have had a memory to look 
back upon what their fathers and their forefathers had 
enjoyed, but which they, alas, through the impotence of 
their fathers, had lost. But our thanksgiving, thank 
God, takes another form. We are thankful and grate- 
ful, on this November day, for the faith and the stead- 
fastness, not alone of our nation, but of other great 
nations older than ours, which, more quickly than we, 
acted on their instincts and their impulses, and as 
clearly as we, perhaps more clearly, saw the great 
issue and proceeded to its determination. 

Out of our body have gone for service and for 
sacrifice almost countless numbers of teachers and of 
taught, and those who, though no longer on our rolls, 
are proudly held among alumni as our elder brothers. 
They have gone by the hundred. They will go before 
the end comes by the thousand. But they will go 
singing and with courage in the faith and the stead- 
fastness which are theirs and in the faith and the 
steadfastness which they leave behind them here. 

Everything that we hold dear now depends upon 
the faith and the steadfastness of England, of France, 
of Italy, and of America. There are other allies, help- 



STEADFAST IN THE FAITH 221 

ful and eager, but those peoples first in the line of 
civilization, of advancement, must provide the faith 
and the steadfastness on which the future history of 
free man is to be built. 

May we not be thankful from the very depths of our 
beings when we see how splendid, how magnificent, 
how generous, have been the convictions, the efforts, 
and the sacrifices that have all indicated with con- 
vincing certainty what the issue, however distant, is 
to be? 

But, members of the university, if we are to have 
faith and if we are to continue steadfast, there must 
be something in which we believe and for which we 
hold steadfastness to be a virtue. That is the answer 
to the false teaching that there are no principles, that 
everything merely happens, and that one happening is 
as important as another, and that life and history are 
like the meaningless play of the log swept in and out 
of the harbor, helplessly, on the moving tides of a 
restless ocean. Believe me, that teaching is false. Be- 
lieve me, that teaching would destroy the basis of your 
character and mine, of this nation's life, of England's 
life, of France's life, of Italy's life, of the life of each 
one of them, for national character resembles indi- 
vidual character in this, that it reveals itself in con- 
duct. It was, if I recall rightly, Mr. Emerson who 
used the striking saying: "What you are makes so 
much noise that I cannot hear what you say." Never 
was the distinction between conduct and mere speech 
more directly or more emphatically put. It makes no 



222 STEADFAST IN THE FAITH 

difference, members of the university, what we profess, 
unless our conduct be adjusted to that profession, re- 
veals it, and takes command of it for fullest expression. 

There are, then, these fundamental principles. I do 
not stop this morning to state them anew. They have 
been stated with superb eloquence in more languages 
than one and by more statesmen and philosophers and 
men of letters than could be gathered in this great 
church. We know them all, we realize them all, we 
have faith in them, and, for that faith, we are thank- 
ful. We shall be steadfast for them, and, for that 
steadfastness, we are thankful. 

Just now, the effort of our enemies — our enemies of 
every type, the enemies of our nation and the enemies 
of social order and progress in every nation — is not so 
much now to undermine our faith as it is to under- 
mine our steadfastness. Victory in this war must 
depend ultimately upon those moral qualities which 
persist, which shall not be discouraged by delay, by 
temporary check, by sacrifice, or by suffering, and 
which shall not be worn away by cunning and subtle 
pleas to our selfishness, by the seduction of phrases, 
or by the solicitations of demagogues. Our steadfast- 
ness, if we are to have it and to be thankful for it, 
must resist all those things. 

Our enemies have surrendered any hope of winning 
this war in a military sense. The failure of their sub- 
marine attack on Great Britain, their inability to 
defend themselves against one thrust after another on 
the western front, have convinced them that, on the 
field of battle, this war cannot be won by them. 



STEADFAST IN THE FAITH 223 

Therefore, during months past, they have set out to 
win it in other ways. They have set out to win it by 
cunning devices to weaken steadfastness and even to 
weaken faith in the armies, in the populations, and in 
the governments of those who are upholding the cause 
of human freedom and human progress. They go 
about with subtle pleas to selfishness, with suggestions 
of greater comfort, greater material gain, suggestions as 
to why should this loss, this sacrifice, go on, in the 
hope that, by breaking down the unity of purpose 
among the free nations, by corrupting their national 
character, and by seducing them from steadfastness, 
this war may end in a drawn battle, which is a German 
victory. 

That, members of the university, is what is going on 
before your eyes and mine. It is going on in Petro- 
grad, it is going on in Rome, it is going on in Paris, it 
is going on in New York. Shall our steadfastness, our 
steadfastness as men and women with individual 
responsibility and individual lives to live, be proof 
against this attack ? Shall our national steadfast- 
ness hold out ? If they do, this new form of seduction 
will fail as the submarine warfare has failed, and the 
sun of that lasting and durable peace, for which all 
rational men are looking and waiting and working, will 
begin to rise over a now clouded and darkened world. 

That, members of the university, is what we must 
recognize. It is there that we must seek the subjects 
of our reflection this morning. It is there that we 
must look for that over which we are to rejoice and for 
which we are to be thankful. We are to rejoice and 



224 STEADFAST IN THE FAITH 

be thankful for faith in these principles. We are to 
rejoice and be thankful for steadfastness in their up- 
holding and their execution. And then we are to see 
to it, each and all, that nothing happens to weaken 
that faith, that nothing happens to destroy or hamper 
that steadfastness, in order that our nation's character, 
and our character — your character and mine — may 
count in this world for construction, for upbuilding, 
for advance, and may not be allowed, even for an 
instant, by the lightest word or the most foolish act, to 
hamper the great and splendid progress of those ideas 
that are so surely marching on. And, our beloved 
university ! When, in her long history, has she ever 
revealed herself more truly than at this crisis, when has 
she ever shown more fully and completely her great 
faith in these principles, and when has she ever more 
completely revealed her steadfastness, with an unanim- 
ity so complete as to be almost absolute ? Our great 
company of men and women, who honor and love 
these two flags that hang over us, have come to give, 
each of his or her power or kind, to this sacrifice and 
to this effort. The great names of long ago ! Could 
they come back to earth and witness what has hap- 
pened here this last six months, they would clap their 
hands together for joy and rejoice that they had laid a 
foundation on which so superb a superstructure could 
be built. 

I am to-day sending a greeting, personal in char- 
acter, to every member of Columbia University who 



STEADFAST IN THE FAITH 225 

has gone into the military or naval or civil service of 
the United States, wherever he may be, in the hope 
that this greeting will reach him even when far from 
home and friends, on or about Christmas day. More 
than two thousand of these personal greetings are 
going out this morning. Nearly seven hundred of 
them are going to men and women already on the soil 
of France. We want each one of them to feel that, 
as Christmas comes and their hearts open toward 
thoughts of home and family and friends, Alma Mater 
is neither careless nor forgetful of them. Let me close 
what I have to say this morning by reading to you 
the greeting which, on behalf of you all, I am sending 
to each of them. 



At this Christmas season when the good cheer and good-will 
that should mark it are so sadly absent from the lives and hearts 
of millions of human beings, Alma Mater has a special word of 
greeting and encouragement for those of her brave and stalwart 
sons who have given themselves to the service of the nation, even 
though their lives be the sacrifice. No contest in which you 
could possibly be engaged can equal this one in moral significance. 
Everything which distinguishes right from wrong in public con- 
duct, everything which marks off principle from expediency in 
national life, everything which draws a line between liberty and 
despotism, everything which removes human opportunity from 
the grasping hand of cruel privilege, waits for its safety, and per- 
haps for its very existence, upon your success and that of the noble 
men of allied nations who are fighting by your side on land and sea. 

Keep a stout heart, no matter how long the waiting, how severe 
the trials, or how near by the danger. Life will not be worth living 
for any of us unless you win this war. Be assured that you are to 



226 STEADFAST IN THE FAITH 

win, for the whole moral and patriotic force of America is behind 
you. Columbia, intensely proud of her share in this struggle and 
of her notable contribution of men and service to its successful 
conduct, sends you this word of good cheer and encouragement. 
When this war shall have been righteously won there will be peace 
on earth for all men of good-will. 



XXII 
THE NEW CALL TO SERVICE 



A message to each Columbia man in service, December 25, 191 8 



\J 

THE NEW CALL TO SERVICE 

To each Columbia man in service : 

One year ago, when the burdens of war were new 
and the outlook doubtful, Alma Mater was glad to 
send you a Christmas message of encouragement and 
good cheer. To-day, as Americans all over the world 
respond to the President's call to give thanks for their 
blessings and their mercies, it is possible to send over- 
seas a message of grateful appreciation, of exultation, 
and of satisfaction that the great task which was before 
the world in its fight against Teuton military autocracy 
has been successfully accomplished. Free men and 
free nations have shown that, given a little time, they 
could so organize and so arm themselves as to beat 
back the forces of the long-prepared and perfectly 
organized military autocracies. This means that free- 
dom is safe on a foundation of strength. 

We are now to prove by our bearing in the presence 
of the problems of the future that freedom is also safe 
on the foundations of reasonableness, of sympathy, and 
of justice. Those who have offered their lives are 
now to be called upon to offer their minds and their 
souls. The sacrifices of war are over, but the sacri- 
fices of peace are only now to begin. These are sacri- 
fices that will put behind us selfishness, greed, and a 
willingness to exploit the souls and the bodies of other 

men. These are sacrifices that will turn our minds 

229 



230 THE NEW CALL TO SERVICE 

away from bigness, from numbers, and from accumu- 
lations, to character, to quality, and to spiritual power. 
We should no longer think of large nations and small 
nations, but only of free nations, joyfully competing 
together in service to mankind and in revelation of 
new and unsuspected powers of helpfulness and prog- 
ress. 

Patriotism will not be superseded by sentimentalism. 
Patriotism will have both a deeper and a finer meaning 
than it has ever had before. Love of country will not 
grow less, but greater, because of the demands that 
each country has made upon its sons, and their ready 
and willing response to its call. A new international 
order will not supersede nations; quite the contrary. 
It will build upon them. The part which each free 
nation can play in the new international order will 
depend primarily upon its own self-consciousness, its 
own self-respect, its own pride, and its own zeal for 
service. 

You have aided, and powerfully aided, in giving to 
the world a peace that is to be based upon justice, 
and that will last so long as justice rules the hearts 
and guides the conduct of men. There can be no 
lasting peace without justice, and justice is the only 
sure, the safe and quick path to durable peace. 



XXIII 
COLUMBIA AND THE WAR 



Address at the annual meeting of the Association of the Alumni 
at the Columbia University Club, New York, November n, 
1918 



COLUMBIA AND THE WAR 

Whoever selected this evening for the annual meet- 
ing of the Association of the Alumni of the College 
was either in the confidence of the German Emperor 
or in that of Marshal Foch. He either knew on what 
day the former gentleman would go by automobile 
into a neighboring country, or he knew on what day 
the latter gentleman would lay before the public the 
most minutely specific terms of unconditional sur- 
render that the world has ever been permitted to read. 

We find ourselves assembled nominally to deal with 
our own affairs; to discuss matters that are of imme- 
diate interest; and then we find the whole world in a 
heat of enthusiasm over one of the very greatest and 
most epoch-marking events in history. It is a little 
difficult, I confess, to keep anything to-night from 
running into the current of thought which is bearing 
on its bosom the hopes of the world. After all, our 
relation to what has been going on and to what is 
now going on and what we hope will go on is thor- 
oughly typical of the historic Columbia. Despite all 
the admirable records that have been kept, despite the 
best endeavors of every recording officer to keep track 
of the happenings, I doubt very much whether the 
historian ever will be able to catch anything more than 
a fractional part of our university's service to the 
nation and to the world at this great time of crisis. 

233 



234 COLUMBIA AND THE WAR 

You know the lengthening line of gold stars upon our 
service flag, and each one of those gold stars represents 
one of the bravest and the best of the men who have 
gone out from our company in the last decade or two. 
Then there are stars that are happily not gold, which 
indicate the service of those who are living and who 
are now, fortunately, likely to escape the risk of death 
or serious injury in these hostilities; but those figures, 
taken by themselves, the service flag looked at by 
itself, can give you no sort of appreciation of the living, 
intimate contact that our men have had and are having 
with every part and parcel of the conduct of this great 
enterprise. What interests me most about it is that 
every time a new piece of news comes, it indicates that 
one of our Columbia men has had that combination of 
qualities which has led him to be called upon to do 
something that particularly required initiative, cour- 
age, unselfish devotion, and the power of leadership; 
and those are the things which, for one hundred and 
sixty odd years, we and those who have gone before 
us have been striving to develop in this company of 
ours, and those are the things which in very large 
measure we have developed. 

You cannot overestimate the service rendered by 
our teaching staff. They all came promptly forward, 
without criticism or demur, to meet these new and 
strange and difficult conditions which have been 
brought about by the emergency of the hour. But 
there is even a brighter side to it than that. I have 
had some of our colleagues come to me and say: "Mr. 



COLUMBIA AND TEE WAR 235 

President, I am perfectly delighted that I have been 
able to get into this war at last. I did not see how I 
could ever do it. I am too old. I did not see how I 
could go to Washington and take up any form of 
clerical work or administrative service. I am not 
quite suited for that, but here is a chance for me to 
go into the preparation of men and officers to take a 
part in this contest, and I am happier than I have 
been since the war began." That comes, gentlemen, 
from men who are no longer young, that comes from 
men whose intellectual interests and habits are remote 
from the kind of instruction which they are now called 
upon to give; but it comes also from their hearts, 
from their devotion, from their patriotism, and from 
their desire to see to it that there shall be no dissenting 
voice when the roll of Columbia is called by Him who 
takes account of national service. I can tell you 
anecdote after anecdote to illustrate that fact, and I 
ask you to believe that our teaching force to a man, 
from the oldest to the youngest, has asked for nothing 
but an opportunity to lend a hand in this enterprise. 

Just now we find ourselves in the face of a most 
threatening situation. If I were an artist with the 
brush, I could ask nothing better than an opportunity 
to paint two pictures and to set them in contrast one 
with the other. I should like to paint a picture called 
Militarism: the Beginning, and I should like to show 
the German forces, armed, insolent, confident, riding 
into Belgium on August 4, 1914. I should like to 
show them trampling old men and women and children 



236 COLUMBIA AND TEE WAR 

under foot. I should like to show them committing 
unspeakable outrages, beating down great temples and 
libraries and universities and churches and public 
buildings. I should like to show the harried city of 
Louvain in minutest detail. Then, over and against 
that, I should like to paint a picture called Militarism : 
the End. And I should like to show His Excellency 
Herr Erzberger, with his accompanying generals and 
admirals, blindfolded, riding in an automobile with a 
white flag to the headquarters of Marshal Foch. I 
should like everybody in this broad land and every- 
body in every high school and college to look on those 
two pictures, and then have some intelligent teacher 
draw the lesson and tell what it means. He could tell 
us of this great towering structure of Prussian mili- 
tarism. He could describe to us how high it had been 
builded and how wide its influence reached, and how 
tremendous were its ambitions and its lusts. Then he 
could tell us how it threw itself, all panoplied and 
armed, against an unthinking and an unprotected 
world. Then he could tell us the story of those last 
four years and three months, ending with that picture, 
and show to our young men the humiliation, the 
shame, and the disaster to one hundred and twenty 
millions of German-speaking people that the architects 
of that great structure have brought down upon them. 
It has cost the lives of at least ten million human 
beings to bring that structure down, and every one of 
those ten million human beings, however humble or 
however great, ought to be remembered forever as a 



COLUMBIA AND THE WAR 237 

hero, because each one of that great company was part 
of the price that the world had to pay to get rid of 
this thing forever. And, gentlemen, it is gone ! Be- 
lieve me, there is no power on earth that can revivify 
it or rebuild it. 

To-night we are looking out toward a new world. 
It is my sober opinion that the next sixty days may 
prove to be the most critical sixty days in modern 
history. We have now torn down this accursed thing, 
and the process of upbuilding is going to begin; and 
the question before every thoughtful man in this world 
is: Shall that upbuilding be on the lines of human 
experience, on the lines of human order, on the lines 
of human liberty, and on the lines of human justice, 
or shall it be an attempt to install, instead of the 
kaiser, the inverted autocracy of a mob ? That, 
gentlemen, is the question which the next sixty days 
may decide. We saw what happened to the Slavic 
people when the Romanoffs fell and the bonds of a 
common loyalty and a common religious faith were 
broken and new and greedy tyrants were set loose to 
feed upon them. In this case we are dealing with a 
different people. We are dealing with the long-disci- 
plined and the long-enslaved Teuton, and we are 
dealing with him at a moment of highest emotionalism. 
The relief which the liberal-minded Teuton might 
have hoped for some day in an inconceivably distant 
future has suddenly dropped upon him out of an open 
sky; and that political and social collapse which the 
disorderly element in society, the preying element, is 



233 COLUMBIA AND THE WAR 

always waiting for, has come without an instant's 
warning. The German people must work out their 
own salvation. Their autocratic government was un- 
able to stand the strain of defeat, or to hold the support 
of people and army in the moment of disaster. The 
German people are, as Bismarck told them over and 
over again, children in politics. Whatever their ac- 
complishments may have been in other directions, 
they are children in politics, and they are not ready 
to be called upon with startling suddenness to fill this 
great gap in their constituted government. Whether 
they can do it or not, whether they will succumb even 
for a time to such a series of forces of destruction as 
has ruled and is ruling in Russia, or whether they will 
rather have some such experience as that of the Paris 
Commune of 1871 after the disaster of Sedan, remains 
to be seen. But, gentlemen, the victors in this war, 
having been the cause of the pulling down of govern- 
ment, have a duty toward the building up of govern- 
ment. We cannot let these great peoples float about 
on the ocean of to-day as derelicts. We owe such 
assistance, such guidance, such policing, such protec- 
tion as will give these wretched people a chance to 
get on their feet with a free government of their own. 
It is not to our interest to have them given over to 
chaos, it is not the world's interest to have them given 
over to chaos. That means more war, desperate war, 
bloody war, war not only of nations, but of classes and 
groups. We owe the world constructive leadership in 
building the governments that are to take the places of 



COLUMBIA AND THE WAR 239 

those that have been overturned. That means, gentle- 
men, that we should not delay one hour to make of 
ourselves and our Allies the beginning of a League of 
Nations to enforce justice and to protect international 
order. When those in big places say that this league 
cannot be formed until they meet at the peace table, 
they are talking what seems to me to be little short of 
madness. Who are coming to this peace table ? Who 
is coming to represent Russia ? Who is coming now 
to represent Germany ? Who is coming to represent 
Bavaria, Baden, and the rest ? There is a perfectly 
plain path for the victorious nations. They have been 
banded together in this great league. They have put 
their armies under one command and their navies 
under one command; they have pooled their financial 
resources, their food, their munitions, their economic 
resources. It is now a simple matter for them to con- 
stitute themselves into a League of Nations, not with 
an elaborate constitution, but with a few simply 
declared purposes for which they have been fighting. 
They can then say to the neutral nations — to Holland, 
to Denmark, to Sweden, to Norway, to Spain: "We 
shall be glad to take you into our league/' Then get 
these new peoples who are trying to organize them- 
selves, and whose political existence and belligerent 
rights have been recognized, the Czecho-Slovaks, the 
Jugo-Slavs, the Poles, and say to them: "Give us your 
programme, show us your plan; point out to us what 
territory seems to belong to your people because it is 
occupied by them or has historic and traditional rela- 



240 COLUMBIA AND THE WAR 

tions to them. Let us examine its economic aspects, 
its elements of economic independence. Let us see 
what can be done about your government. If you 
believe in our purposes, hold your Constituent Assem- 
bly, arrive at your own form of government, adopt 
your own constitution. When those questions are 
settled in the spirit of justice and sympathy and order, 
we will admit you too to the League of Nations as 
independent members of the brotherhood of states." 
After that we can say to the Teutonic peoples: "As 
an organized world, we are now ready to take up your 
question with you. You sang hymns of hate. We 
do not propose to do that. You attacked the world. 
We have thrashed you and shown you that you could 
not dominate us. Now, then, let us see what are the 
elements among you for a free and orderly and liberty- 
loving and responsible state; and, when you have 
shown us that, whether it takes five years or fifty, 
when you have washed off your hands the blood of 
Belgium and Serbia and France; the blood of the 
widows and orphans and hospital-ships; and the blood 
of the Lusitania and the Sussex and the rest; when 
you have cleansed your hands and your souls; and 
when you have done those things which free and self- 
respecting people must do, then we will take up your 
application for membership in the League of Nations, 
but not until then." 

It all depends, gentlemen, upon whether we propose 
to have an orderly world to go forward in progress 
and peace and happiness along the lines for which this 



COLUMBIA AND THE WAR 241 

war has been fought, or whether we propose to senti- 
mentalize about it and to trade away the great advan- 
tages that have been won for the race and not for any 
special nation, and so face the prospect of our grand- 
children having to do it all over again. 

That is the question, gentlemen, of to-morrow. Are 
we ready ? Have we the courage, have we the devo- 
tion, have we the leadership, to organize this world for 
order, for peace, and for progress, or must we, even in 
the slightest degree, risk a repetition of the horrors of 
these past years ? I trust, as the world and its na- 
tions approach that problem, that everywhere, in the 
army of those who study, in the army of those who 
teach, in the army of those who lead, in the army of 
those who give direction, in the army of those who 
accomplish, everywhere there will be found the same 
type of Columbia man who has been carrying the flag 
through the dangers of war on land and sea. 



XXIV 
THE CONQUESTS OF WAR AND OF PEACE 



Address at the Victory Celebration of the Students' Army Train- 
ing Corps, South Court, Columbia University, November 12, 
1918 



THE CONQUESTS OF WAR AND OF PEACE 

Soldiers and Sailors of the United States: 

We are met to celebrate and to take note of one of 
the great turning-points in the progress of the human 
race. It may, perhaps, be doubted whether at any- 
time more momentous and far-reaching consequences 
have hung upon a great decision. The decision, which 
was military in form, is much more than military in 
fact. It does not mean merely that one great group of 
armies has conquered another. It does not mean 
simply that one great group of people has subdued an- 
other. It means that one great group of ideals of 
human life and conduct have conquered another, a 
lower and much more material group, I believe, for- 
ever. The ideals that have conquered on the field of 
battle, that have inspired the peoples and guided the 
armies of the nations of free men, are the ideals which 
long ago took possession of Great Britain, of France, 
and of the United States, and to the progress and ap- 
plication of which we owe all that we are and all that 
we hope to be. 

You had been chosen by the people of the United 
States to participate in this great contest, and you had 
been put in training with a view to becoming officers 
and leaders of men in this stupendous contest. But it 
so happened that, before your training was complete, 

245 



246 THE CONQUESTS OF WAR 

before you could reach the battle-field, the great fabric 
that military autocracy had been so long in building 
has come tumbling to the ground, its foundations 
undermined and taken away forever. But, soldiers 
and sailors, just because this contest was military in 
form and a contest of ideas in fact, just because of that, 
your training has only just begun. The nation's need 
of your service has only been hinted at, and your 
opportunity to serve America, her Allies, and the free 
world will be far greater than we have ever known or 
expected. 

See into what a new world you are entering as 
soldiers and sailors in training ! You are entering 
into a world great portions of which must be policed, 
great areas of which must be held under strict military 
discipline and control, in order that the forces of dis- 
order, the forces of rapine, the forces of destruction, 
the forces of organized selfishness and greed may not 
prevent these peoples from whom we have stricken the 
shackles of autocracy from founding their own free, 
liberal, and advancing governments. 

We know what has happened during the past twelve 
months to the people and the country that once were 
Russians and Russia. We see signs of disorder and 
dismemberment in the great empires of Austria- 
Hungary and of Germany, and now we are to enter 
upon the task of reconstruction. We have had to beat 
down, in order that we might prepare the way to 
build up. Now each one of you, as an American 
soldier or sailor and as an American citizen, is called 



AND OF PEACE 247 

upon to subject himself to the stern discipline of 
preparation for reconstruction and for peace. 

Your answer to that plea will be a test of your 
characters. The emotional interest, the great excite- 
ment, the tragic experiences, the tremendous risks and 
losses of war are now withdrawn. Therefore, without 
that great emotional assistance, you are left face 
to face with opportunity, with duty, with need for 
service, and your characters will be tested by your 
action, as your courage would have been tested had 
you gone overseas to take your place on the line of 
fire. 

America has never so greatly needed as now youth 
of discipline, of self-respect, of clear understanding of 
issues and problems, of power for productive service 
and work. All those things are coming to you in your 
daily life, in your daily drill, in your daily exercise, 
and in your daily study. Everything that you have 
done will be of immediate and direct use and applica- 
tion in dealing with the problems of to-morrow, when 
you will have to steel yourselves to deal with them by 
force of will and without the driving power of a strong 
emotion which the experiences of war naturally fur- 
nish. 

The world is going to have an experience that it has 
never had before. It is going into a year of life with- 
out a spring. The millions of youths who represented 
the spring are gone. Our own service flag is covered 
with gold stars, each one of which has wrung our 
hearts as we put it there. We are now about to make 



24S THE CONQUESTS OF WAR 

a new type of service flag and to look to you men who 
are going to take the places in the public life, in the 
business affairs, in the many undertakings of America, 
of those whom the holocaust of war destroyed, to you 
and your contemporaries, the youth of your age all 
over this land, to come and take the leadership in 
solving the problems of to-morrow. The old men, the 
tired men, may counsel, but it is too late to ask them 
to take up this stupendous burden. The world of 
to-morrow belongs to the young. The world of to- 
morrow belongs to you. The world of to-morrow be- 
longs to those like you in the schools and colleges all 
over this land, and in France and Britain and Italy and 
the rest, where they are all inspired by the ideas that 
have given you your place in this university and your 
place in this war. 

What a prospect, gentlemen, what a prospect ! 
What an opportunity and what a responsibility ! 
Take every ounce of training that you can get. De- 
vote yourselves day and night to the work of this 
camp and this university for so many months or years 
as may be needed to bring you to a point where you 
are consciously ready to go out and take up your 
share of the responsibility which is yours. 

Then remember that you are going into a world 
where men must think, where men must have sym- 
pathy, where men must have patience, where men 
must know how to build. We cannot leave all that 
has been destroyed to lie across the path of history as 
a desert waste. We must now make it to blossom 



AND OF PEACE 249 

like the rose with peoples, with industries, with happy 
homes, with sound ideas; and it may be, God willing, 
that when years have passed, it will have been your 
happy lot to find that you were prepared effectively 
to bind up the wounds of a broken world, and, under 
the guidance of your beloved country and your coun- 
try's flag, to play a most leading part in putting this 
new world upon a foundation that cannot be shaken. 

I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart, not 
only upon what this day so tremendously marks, but 
upon that to-morrow which beckons you to conquer it 
as well. 



XXV 
CLEAR THINKING 



Address on Commencement Day, June n, 1902 



CLEAR THINKING 

Over eight hundred young men and young women 
go out to-day from this university. Most of you 
will never return as students. For nearly all the 
period of formal preparation is now closed, and you 
are to prove your quality as educated men and women 
by the use you make of your training here. That 
training has been singularly diverse, and its diversity 
fittingly represents the broad range of the intellectual 
interests of to-day. Some of you have given four glad 
years to the liberal arts and sciences in Columbia 
College or in Barnard College, and are the richer in 
nature and in opportunity for contact with those 
fertile subjects of study which have nurtured genera- 
tion after generation of our forefathers. Others have 
grown into a comprehension of the fundamental prin- 
ciples which underlie the several learned professions — 
law, medicine, teaching, engineering, architecture, and 
the rest — and have become skilled in following those 
principles to their various and several practical applica- 
tions. Still others, with a scholar's career in view, led 
on by that scientific curiosity that is but another form 
of the childlike wonder which gave rise to all science, 
have gone far along the road toward the boundary of 
present knowledge in some chosen field, and have even, 
perhaps, experienced the thrill which accompanies the 
feeling that to go farther is to venture upon as yet 

253 



254 CLEAR THINKING 

untrodden ground. You have all, I trust, caught the 
earnest, helpful, democratic spirit of Columbia Univer- 
sity, and have thereby grown in personal character 
and in reverence for the truth because of your life 
here. 

Various as your studies have been and varied as 
your accomplishments are, there is one art in which 
you should all have gained practice, even though its 
complete mastery is still distant or, perhaps, reserved 
for the few. I mean the art of clear thinking. 

To think clearly and straight is not easy, but by 
few standards can sound mental training be so well 
measured as by this. Clear thinking implies trained 
powers of observation, analysis and inference, and a 
balance between intellect and emotion which is not 
often inborn. Clear thinking can be gained only by 
practice. Logic is its form, scientific method is its 
instrument, sanity and mental poise are its presup- 
positions. That tranquillity of mind which Seneca has 
described in a noteworthy essay is an important aid. 
All these things your education should have brought 
you in some measure, whether that education has been 
general or special. Without these, your learning and 
your skill, however great, will be wasted. Clear 
thinking implies, too, a detachment which holds 
passion and temper at arm's length while opinion is 
forming, although warmth of feeling has its proper 
place in the subsequent expression of conviction. 
Passion for the truth is quite different from passion 
at the truth. 



CLEAR THINKING 255 

Fortunately, the pathways to the art of clear think- 
ing are many, and each student in this university finds 
one opening before him. The patient dissection of a 
mathematical problem, of a grammatical construction, 
of a bit of matter living or dead; the careful analysis 
of a judicial opinion, the diagnosis of disease, the 
observation of human minds — all these lead to the 
exercise of the powers upon which the art of clear 
thinking depends. If these pathways be trodden for 
four years or even for a shorter time, the student has 
gained thereby a precious intellectual possession which 
outweighs any amount of variety of mere information. 

The skilful authors of the Pott Royal Logic, the 
precepts of which have had much to do with the 
exquisite order, precision, and clearness which charac- 
terize the scientific and literary expositions of the 
writers of modern France, pointed out no fewer than 
nine different ways of reasoning ill. To be avoided, 
these ways of reasoning ill must be known, in order 
that they may be recognized in one's own mental proc- 
esses. For these and other practical matters which 
affect the art of clear thinking, and its opposite, I 
commend to you the admirable tract on The Conduct 
of the Understanding by the philosopher Locke. For 
the student who cares for clear thinking — and what 
student does not ? — and who wishes to avoid slovenli- 
ness and inaccuracy of mind, it is perhaps the most 
useful book in the English language. I wish that each 
of you might not only read it, but own it and open it 
often. As a guide to the understanding of one's own 



256 CLEAR THINKING 

mental processes and states and to a knowledge of the 
obstacles and aids to clear thinking, this little book 
of a hundred pages seems to me to have no equal. 
Hallam said of it years ago that it gives the reader 
"a sober and serious, not flippant or self-conceited 3 
independency of thinking/' 

Be assured, too, that clear thinking lies at the basis 
of the art of expression. He who cannot explain does 
not wholly understand. He who fully understands 
has taken the first long step toward attaining the 
power to make known. Columbia would gladly make 
the art of clear thinking and the power of lucid and 
elegant expression the mark of her sons and daughters. 
That you have gained something, much, in each of 
these directions, we hope and we believe. Do not 
relax your vigilance in after years, but help these good 
habits to become positively irresistible through con- 
stant and adequate exercise. 

You take with you, each and all, the sincerest good- 
will of the university of which you have been student- 
members and to which you will ever belong. May 
you be equal in all ways to the high demands of a life 
which is, in the words of Burke, a life of manly, moral, 
regulated liberty! 



XXVI 
THE GOSPEL OF HOPE 



Address on Commencement Day, June 10, 1903 



THE GOSPEL OF HOPE 

Columbia University parts to-day with another 
goodly company of her sons and daughters. Regret 
and expectancy are, I doubt not, the feelings upper- 
most in your minds; hope and confidence are those 
which the university cherishes for you. Your pres- 
ence here is a mark that you have done what has been 
asked of you academically, and the future lies with 
you alone. 

Let me lay stress for a moment or two upon the 
point of view from which your work in life is to be 
approached. There is, I feel sure, neither happiness 
nor usefulness to be found in cultivating indifference, 
cynicism, or pessimism. There are those who feel 
that the educated youth of our land are apt to hold 
themselves aloof from popular interests and move- 
ments, and to view from one side, or from above, the 
active life of our democracy. This impression is not, 
I think, a just one; at all events, it is certainly less 
well founded now than ever before; but such founda- 
tion as it has should be rudely taken from it by your 
efforts and by your careers. If education and training 
are to unfit men, mentally, for sympathetic participa- 
tion in the every-day life of the nation, then the less of 
education and training that we have, the better. In 
that case we are starving the soul to feed the mind. 

259 



2 6o THE GOSPEL OF HOPE 

But the education of to-day is not of that sort. It is 
insistent in its demands for practical application, for 
service, for human sympathy. It implies faith in God 
and in man, and joyous participation in human efforts. 

There is no true life-gospel but the gospel of hope, 
the gospel of belief; not that all is as right as it can be, 
but that all is righteous and can be made more right- 
eous still. Carl Hilty, in his charming essay on Happi- 
ness, has truly said that "Pessimism as a permanent 
habit of mind is, for the most part, only a mantle of 
philosophy through which, when it is thrown back, 
there looks out the face of vanity; — a vanity which is 
never satisfied and which withholds one forever from 
a contented mind." The vain, the self-centred man 
is at bottom a cynic, for even his own self-satisfaction 
is not perfect. 

This university would put upon its graduates the 
stamp of earnestness, not paltering; of enthusiasm, 
not indifference; of hope and cheerfulness, not despair 
and gloom; of active interest in our fellow men, and 
not supercilious contempt for them and their affairs. 
Do not fear to be in earnest, and pay no heed to the 
whisper that it is "bad form ,, to be enthusiastic. Be 
human; be real. 

Nearly forty years ago Thomas Carlyle made a 
famous address to the students of Edinburgh as Lord 
Rector of the university. It abounded in wisdom and 
common sense, and its advice to the Edinburgh stu- 
dents is comprised in the one sentence: Be diligent. 
But Carlyle went on to tell what he meant by dili- 



THE GOSPEL OF HOPE 261 

gence. It included, he said, all virtues that a student 
can have, all those qualities of conduct that lead on to 
the acquirement of real instruction and improvement. 
Most of all, it included honesty, intellectual as well as 
moral honesty. "A dishonest man cannot do any- 
thing real." That is a fine sentence and a true one; 
it may be paraphrased by saying that character makes 
knowledge worth while. 

I would rather have this great company of students 
face the world with cheerfulness and hope and with 
complete honesty than endowed in any other way. 

You go out to-day from under the shadow of a great 
tradition. For nearly a century and a half it has been 
slowly forming. Lives without number have been 
built into it. The years have crowned it with power 
and with beauty. It is a branch of something far 
older, that runs back till it loses itself in the beginnings 
of things. It marks the rise and dominance of the 
human spirit. Here you have come under its influence; 
here you have caught something of its meaning. 

May you each in his own way be a bearer of the 
tradition which you have come to know. May you 
all find usefulness, and if it be God's will, happiness 
also. Mere success, as the world judges success by 
outward signs, I pass by. It is not worth having save 
as an incident to usefulness. 



XXVII 
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY 



Address on Commencement Day, June 8, 1904 



PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY 

It is an anxious moment when an engine, long in 
building, is finally to be put to its practical test. Will 
it work ? Was its plan well made and was it wisely 
executed ? The steam is let into the cylinder, the 
piston-rod moves, and the wheels begin to turn. The 
machine works, and the labor put upon it is worth 
while. The behavior of the machine in practice is the 
supreme test of the wisdom and skilful execution of 
its plan. 

What is true of an engine is yet more true of men 
and women. The university scans closely the faces of 
those who pass out of its gates from year to year, in 
order that it may, if possible, forecast the future. Will 
these men and women work in practice ? Has their 
training been wisely planned and skilfully executed ? 
If so, the university has done its part. But one cru- 
cial question remains. Can and will each individual 
student who bears the university's name, worthily use 
the training it has given him ? This is the question of 
personal responsibility, and it cannot be shirked. 

It is not at all hard to bring home the feeling of 
responsibility in the abstract, but it is often a matter 
of extreme difficulty to enforce it in the concrete. We 
are always ready to legislate standards for others, but 
not so quick to apply them to ourselves. I hold a feel- 
ing of high responsibility to God and to man for the 

265 



266 PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY 

use of one's knowledge and training, to be an essential 
part of an education that is genuine. Subtract that 
feeling, and the most cunningly contrived intellect 
becomes an engine without a governor. With it, even 
an imperfect intellectual machine will accomplish use- 
ful results. 

The college and university graduates of to-day need 
to reflect long and earnestly upon their responsibility. 
The parable of the talents applies to them. They 
must give some return for what has been so freely 
given to them. Moreover, they must feel the re- 
sponsibility for giving this return, and must act upon it. 

These graduates owe to themselves and to their 
community many things. One is intellectual honesty. 
You who have studied logic and you who have applied 
scientific method to the solution of innumerable prob- 
lems know the relation between premise and con- 
clusion, and you know that the truth-loving and truth- 
seeking mind will not permit contradiction between 
the one and the other. It is your bounden duty to 
exemplify this in practical life. Fashion, fear, am- 
bition, avarice, all will tempt you to deny your honest 
beliefs. If you yield, your education here is in so far 
imperfect or you thereby renounce your responsibility 
for the use to which you put that education. 

It might be said of responsibility, as Emerson said 
of truth, that you cannot have both it and repose. 
You must choose between them. "He in whom the 
love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, 
the first philosophy, the first political party he meets, — 



PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY 267 

most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity and 
reputation; but he shuts the door of truth." So also 
he shuts the door of responsibility. Whatever his be- 
belief, in action — or rather inaction — he denies respon- 
sibility. 

No educated man can afford to prefer repose to 
responsibility. He must act continually and coura- 
geously, and with all the light that his education has 
given him. Then and then only can he approach an 
understanding of the meaning of the high praise that 
Matthew Arnold gave to Sophocles: 

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole. 

There is a university visible and a university in- 
visible. The one is made up of these stately build- 
ings, of the throng of teachers and students, of these 
recurring ceremonials. The other exists in the spirit 
which animates the whole and which, overpassing 
these near bounds, inspires and guides the thousands 
who have gone out from us. To-day you are crossing 
the line beyond which lies the university invisible. 
Over there you are none the less in and of Columbia 
than you have been while here. Henceforth it is 
yours to share the responsibility for that school of the 
higher learning which was called into being a century 
and a half ago, not only to promote a liberal education 
but to make that education "as beneficial as may be." 



XXVIII 
THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF 



Address on Commencement Day, June 14, 1905 



THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF 

Matthew Arnold is responsible for a significant story 
of the poet Shelley. Mrs. Shelley was choosing a school 
for her son and asked the advice of a friend. The 
reply was: "O! Send him somewhere where they will 
teach him to think for himself"; to which Mrs. Shelley 
answered: "Teach him to think for himself! Teach 
him rather to think like other people." Which is the 
easier, and which the more important ? 

The late provost of Trinity College, Dublin, Doctor 
George Salmon, learned alike in mathematics and 
theology, found no difficulty in coming to a prompt 
conclusion: "The labor of forming opinions for them- 
selves," he once wrote, "is too much for most men and 
for almost all women. They look out for some author- 
ity from whom they can take opinions ready made, 
and people value their opinions by a different rule 
from that according to which they value their other 
possessions. Other things they value in proportion to 
the trouble it has cost them to come by them; but the 
less labor of their own they have bestowed in forming 
their opinions, the greater their scorn for those who do 
not covet them, the greater their indignation against 
those who try to deprive them of them." 

These quotations put strikingly before us the time- 
old problem of the behavior of the individual in the 

presence of the mass. In one form or another this 

271 



272 THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF 

problem has perplexed the human mind for nearly 
three thousand years. The ancient moral philoso- 
phers, the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, the logicians, 
moralists, and scientists of to-day, have all struggled 
and are all struggling with this same problem in one 
or another of its aspects. 

Reduced to its lowest terms and applied to the con- 
crete interests of the moment, our question is this: 
Shall the university so train its students that they 
think for themselves or that they think like other 
people ? 

Let us choose the first alternative. The university 
shall so train its students that they think for them- 
selves. Confident and jaunty the happy company of 
students go out into the work of the world. Each 
thinks for himself. Here and there is one who is 
sternly logical and who will not be denied the con- 
clusions that follow from his premises. He thinks for 
himself in regard to some questions of public order, 
some questions of property, some questions of re- 
sponsibility and liability. The heavy hand of the 
law is suddenly laid upon his shoulder and he is haled 
to a prison or to an asylum for lunatics. His protest 
that he is an educated man, thinking for himself, is 
unsympathetically jeered at. He is so individual that 
he is a nuisance and a danger, and the community 
suppresses him at once. Apparently, then, our choice 
was a wrong one, and the university should not teach 
men and women to think for themselves. 

Let us turn to the second alternative. The univer- 



THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF 273 

sity should so train its students that they think like 
other people. Cast in one mould, they step across 
Alma Mater's portals, outward bound, conventional- 
ized, and ready to do homage to what Goethe so felici- 
tously describes as 

Was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine. 

For them whatever is, is right, and the only progress 
is to stand still. For some reason or other, this result 
fails to satisfy as an ideal, and we cannot resist the 
conclusion that, after all, it is not enough for the 
university to train its students to think like other 
people. 

Idiosyncrasy and convention, then, are alike un- 
satisfactory, and we travel back to the wisdom and 
human insight of Aristotle for a clew to the escape 
from our dilemma. "Excess and deficiency," he said, 
"equally destroy the health and strength, while what 
is proportionate preserves and augments them." 

The university is to train men and women — this 
means — in part to think for themselves and in part 
to think like other people. They must think like 
other people sufficiently to make their thinking for 
themselves worth while. They must have a fulcrum 
for their lever, and that fulcrum is the common appre- 
hension and comprehension of the lessons of past 
human experience, particularly as that experience 
crystallizes into the institutions of civilization. The 
world and human society cannot now be built over 
just as if no plan had been prepared, no foundation 



274 THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF 

laid, no work already done. It is society formed 
which must be taken as the basis for society reformed. 
It is from this year of grace and not from the creation 
that he who is to think for himself must take his 
departure. The university must in so far train its 
students to think like other people; this much assured, 
it must then train its students to think for themselves. 

As persons you are raised above the domain of 
things and into a dominion of your own. Persons 
must look with their own eyes, judge with their own 
minds, act with their own wills. To stand up to the 
full measure of manhood or womanhood is task enough 
for any one, and it is the business of the university to 
train you for that task by teaching you first to think 
like other people and then to think for yourselves. 
Mrs. Shelley's mother instinct guided her aright as to 
where to lay the emphasis in the education of the 
erratic genius who was her son. For him to learn to 
think like other people was more important than to 
learn to think for himself. For most of us the reverse 
is true. I am confident that the university has in one 
form or another pressed this lesson upon you all. 

For the older members of the university I extend to 
these younger ones hearty congratulations and every 
good wish for the years that are to come. May you 
always look back upon the years spent here as the 
happiest and most fruitful of your useful lives. 



XXIX 
THE SPIRIT OF UNREST 



Address on Commencement Day, June 13, 1906 



THE SPIRIT OF UNREST 

For the American of ambition and education who 
would use his powers to best advantage in the service 
of his country and of humanity, there is no book of 
instruction equal in value to the life of Abraham 
Lincoln. That life tells the story of a noble soul nur- 
tured from humblest beginnings by severe self-disci- 
pline, by contact with men, by constant occupation 
with large human interests and with lofty thoughts; 
a soul endowed with "a patience like that of nature, 
which in its vast and fruitful activity knows neither 
haste nor rest." Tested and tried as never ruler was 
before, distraught with conflicting counsel and urged 
hither and yon by every powerful influence, Lincoln's 
nature never lost its poise nor his judgment its clear- 
sighted sanity. He saved a nation because he re- 
mained tranquil amid angry seas. 

This great company of graduates goes out from the 
university into the active work of the world at a par- 
ticularly important and critical time. Unless all signs 
fail, we are entering upon a period* of social and eco- 
nomic, perhaps even of political, reconstruction. A 
spirit of unrest is abroad, not only in our own land, 
but in other lands as well. So far as this unrest has 
an intellectual foundation, it appears to be the con- 
viction that the eighteenth-century formulas and 
axioms upon which our social and political fabric is so 

■ 277 



278 THE SPIRIT OF UNREST 

largely built do not work as they were expected to 
work. So far as this unrest has an economic founda- 
tion, it appears to be dissatisfaction with actual and 
possible rewards for industry. So far as it has a polit- 
ical foundation, it appears to be a perception of easily 
demonstrated inequalities of power and influence and 
of an equally easily demonstrated inequality of benefits 
from governmental policies. 

That this unrest has been and is being used by 
ambitious men for their own selfish ends and for gain 
by journalistic builders of emotional bonfires is cer- 
tainly true; but it will not do to dismiss this spirit of 
unrest with a sneer on that account. 

It has passed far beyond the bounds of the dreamers 
and visionaries, the violent-minded, and the naturally 
destructive. Men accustomed to honest reflection and 
themselves possessed of property, always the sheet- 
anchor of conservatism, have come under its influence. 
Policies that not long ago were dismissed as too extreme 
for serious discussion are now soberly examined with 
reference to their immediate practicability. What has 
brought about this change ? 

An answer is not far to seek. An increasing number 
of men have come to distrust the capacity of society as 
now organized to protect itself against the freebooters 
who exist in it. An increasing number of men believe 
and assert that law and justice are powerless before 
greed and cunning, and they are the more ready to 
listen to advocacy of any measure or policy, however 
novel or revolutionary, that promises relief. Their 



THE SPIRIT OF UNREST 279 

imaginations, too, cannot help being affected by the 
appalling sight, so often called to our attention of 
late, of that moral morgue wherein are exposed the 
shrivelled souls and ruined reputations of those who 
have lost in the never-ending struggle between selfish- 
ness and service that goes on in the human breast. 

Where amid all this shall the university graduate 
throw his influence ? 

The first duty of the trained and educated mind 
when it faces conditions such as these and must take 
a definite and responsible attitude toward them is not 
to lose its balance, its poise, its self-control. It is 
worth while to look back at the majestic figure of 
Lincoln, crowned now with immortality's laurel, tran- 
quil amid far angrier seas than ours. 

Not much is to be gained by passionate denunciation 
of principles and men, if there is no clear perception of 
where the difficulty lies and of what it is that is to be 
remedied. A first step, then, is an analysis of the 
conditions complained of and their genesis. I lay 
particular emphasis upon their genesis, for most re- 
builders of society are singularly neglectful of history. 
Their lip-service of evolution does not often carry 
them to the point of considering our present institu- 
tions — social, economic, political — as evolved, and, 
therefore, as having the weight of years and human 
experience behind them. 

Looking back over a thousand years or more, it is 
plain that civilized man has travelled far. An exami- 
nation of his progress will show, I think, that it rests 



28o THE SPIRIT OF UNREST 

mainly upon three principles, gradually evolved and 
erected into institutions: Civil and industrial liberty, 
private property, and the inviolability of contract. 
Upon these as a corner-stone rests what we know 
to-day as civilized human society. That our society 
has its evils, terrible and dangerous, cannot be denied. 
That greed for gain holds an appalling number of men 
in its grasp and that the moral tone of large business 
undertakings is painfully low are only too evident. 
But it is quite too rash a conclusion to infer that so- 
ciety must be destroyed and its corner-stone displaced 
before those evils can be remedied. It may be true — 
and I think it is — that the difficulty is not so much 
with the tried and tested principles upon which society 
rests as with the honesty and intelligence with which 
those principles are worked. The abounding pros- 
perity of our country with its untold opportunities for 
material success, the loosening of the hold of some of 
the old religious and ethical sanctions of conduct, and 
the weakening of parental control and discipline, have 
united to place upon American character a burden 
which in too many instances it has not been able 
to bear. 

It is our own individual characters that are at fault 
and not the institutions whose upbuilding is the work 
of the ages. Sound and upright individual human 
characters will uplift society far more speedily and 
surely than any constitutional or legislative nostrum 
or the following of any economic or philosophical will- 
o'-the-wisp. Unethical acts precede illegal ones and 



THE SPIRIT OF UNREST 281 

speedily lead to them. Given an acute perception of 
the difference between right and wrong, a clear con- 
ception of duty, and an appreciation of the solemn 
obligations of a trust, our social and political system 
would, perhaps, be found to work equitably and well. 
Without these traits no system is workable. Moral 
regeneration, not political and economic reconstruc- 
tion, is what we chiefly need. 

This view of our present-day problems I press upon 
you with all the emphasis at my command. Most of 
all I ask you to keep your balance and poise in the 
presence of excitement and turmoil, and to learn well 
the lesson of him who led men — 

"By his clear-grained human worth, 
And brave old wisdom of sincerity" 

— Abraham Lincoln. 



XXX 

LYNCH-LAW 



Address on Commencement Day, June 12, 1907 



LYNCH-LAW 

A Virginia planter of the eighteenth century, himself 
a Quaker, and so, presumably, a lover of law and 
order and peace, has given his name to that mode of 
summary punishment, without due authority, which is 
everywhere known as lynch-law. The word to lynch 
may properly be extended to cover not only summary 
acts without warrant of law, but summary judgments 
without due knowledge of the facts. In this sense 
the lynching habit is both wide-spread and growing. 
Men and women of education and sound training may 
well be put on their guard against it. 

The mad rush of our contemporary life, the haste 
to pass on to something new and more exciting, the 
daily press with its hectic head-lines and its guillotine- 
like opinions, all assist us to form the habit of acting 
and judging without thinking. It is amazing how 
large a part of our every-day mental attitudes, whether 
as to men or public policies or passing events, are the 
result of the lynching habit. A passage from a public 
address, torn loose from its setting; a partial or par- 
tisan presentation of a political act or measure; or a 
distorted and inaccurate account of some important 
happening, will serve to fix our permanent attitude 
toward a man or an event, and we may never know 

how hopelessly inadequate or erroneous the grounds 

285 



286 LYNCH-LAW 

for that attitude are. We pass on in blind error to 
still other and more confident lynchings. 

The training that a university offers is the surest 
corrective of the lynching habit. In the laboratory, 
the lecture-room, and the seminar, facts are carefully 
collected and sifted and weighed, and final judgment 
is held in suspense until the process is ended. Even 
then the judgment is held subject to the discovery of 
new evidence. This mental state is not one of uncer- 
tainty, but of open-mindedness. Open-mindedness 
and the habit of reserving judgment until the facts 
are established will soon rid our natures of the lynch- 
ing habit and its deplorable intellectual and moral 
effects. To set this example to others is just now a 
duty that is heavily incumbent on men and women of 
university training. 

The lynching habit also finds support in the present- 
day demand for immediate and tangible results, no 
matter how difficult the problem or how involved the 
process. This demand is in itself highly irrational. 
In his invaluable essay On Compromise John Morley 
calls attention to the wholly unwarranted impatience 
at the slowness of social and political and intellectual 
change. "People seldom realize," he says, "the 
enormous period of time which each change in men's 
ideas requires for its full accomplishment. We speak 
of these changes with a peremptory kind of definite- 
ness, as if they covered no more than the space of a 
few years. . . . Yet the Reformation is the name for 
a movement of the mind of northern Europe, which 



LYNCH-LAW 287 

went on for three centuries. Then if we turn to that 
still more momentous set of events, the rise and estab- 
lishment of Christianity, one might suppose that we 
could fix that within a space of half a century or so. 
Yet it was at least four hundred years before all the 
foundations of that great superstructure of doctrine 
and organization were completely laid. . . . We lose 
the reality of history, we fail to recognize one of the 
most striking aspects of human affairs, and above all 
we miss that most invaluable practical lesson, the 
lesson of patience, unless we remember that the great 
changes of history took up long periods of time which, 
when measured by the little life of a man, are almost 
colossal, like the vast changes of geology." 

To resist the tendency to lynch-law judgments of 
men and things and to cultivate that admirable intel- 
lectual patience which is a sure attribute of wisdom 
are excellent undertakings for us all. Especially are 
they excellent undertakings for those who, like this 
great company of college and university graduates, are 
now to be held responsible by their Alma Mater and 
by the community at large for their use of the training 
they have received and the opportunities they have 
enjoyed. 



XXXI 
CONTACT WITH THE FIRST-RATE 



Address on Commencement Day, May 27, 1908 



CONTACT WITH THE FIRST-RATE 

The goodly company that to-day goes out from these 
walls with the tokens of Alma Mater's satisfaction and 
approval looks almost of necessity forward. New and 
strange tasks are now to be begun and life's careers 
are now to be entered upon. Our university is to be 
justified, or not, of her children according as these 
tasks are performed and these careers accomplished. 
How shall each one of you know ten years hence, or 
twenty, whether he is still growing in nature and in 
spirit, and whether he is really doing things that are 
worth while in the world ? This question implies that 
there are standards by the application of which we 
are able to determine whether the answer is to be yes 
or no. 

There is no revelation of character, of its solidity 
or its hollowness, like that of the standard to which one 
resorts for the test of excellence. These standards are 
to be chosen with full recognition of the high signifi- 
cance of the choice, and when chosen they are to be 
treasured as their value deserves. Our standards of 
physical measurement are carefully kept from ex- 
posure to heat and cold, to dust and disturbance, that 
their accuracy may not be impaired. Just so are our 
standards of intellectual and moral measurement in 

need of protection. They, too, suffer from abuse, 

291 



292 CONTACT WITH THE FIRST-RATE 

from misuse, and from exposure, and when they so 
suffer the results are in high degree unhappy. 

A university has done but poorly for the student if 
it has not given him safe and enduring standards for 
the measurement of intellectual and moral excellence. 
The educated man or woman should know, and there- 
fore should shun, the sham, the tawdry, the preten- 
tious, and the second-rate. Nothing is so health- 
giving to the human spirit as constant association with 
what is truly first-rate. In reading the story of the 
life of Gladstone, one can almost see his nature grow 
deeper and stronger and broader through contact with 
noble aspiration, with large problems of public con- 
cern, with the most excellent books, and with the most 
elevated spirits of his time. So, in lesser degree, it 
may be for each one of us. If we choose the excellent 
and abide by it, the excellent will reward us with its 
gifts of power and satisfaction. 

A most persistent enemy of sound standards is the 
tendency to delight in the applause of the crowd, and 
in the acclaim of the unthinking, the immature, and 
the ill-informed. More than one leader of men, past 
and present, has been led astray by the strong tempta- 
tion which this tendency offers. Sometimes one al- 
most feels that the noisiest policy is to pass for the 
best, and that that which is at the moment the most 
popular is to be adjudged the wisest. This confusion 
is the chief danger to which democracy is exposed. 
What men want often contradicts what men ought to 
have, and to bring the two into harmon}^ is the su- 



CONTACT WITH THE FIRST-RATE 293 

preme task alike of education and of statesmanship. 
Not the clamor of the crowd, however angry or how- 
ever emphatic, but what Sir Thomas Browne quaintly 
called "the judgment of the judicious," is the true 
standard of merit. To it we must constantly and 
hopefully repair. We should never be tempted or 
cajoled or frightened into deserting it. Moreover, we 
soon learn that time is an element in all weighty judg- 
ments as to the excellence of human endeavor. If it 
be true that distance lends enchantment to the view, 
it is also true that distance gives a sense of true pro- 
portion and perspective, and an opportunity to take 
notice of the consequences of actions and undertakings. 
Many lives that promise well end in disappointment 
or worse. Observation of the activities of men seems 
to warrant the belief that the promise of twenty or 
twenty-five is not often fulfilled at forty or forty-five. 
Each human life appears to be projected into view 
with a certain initial velocity and a certain potential 
energy, and the trajectory of most lives, even those 
from which much is expected, tends to bring them, 
through loss of initiative, to the level of assured 
mediocrity by forty or forty-five years of age. Length 
of years and capacity for achievement seem to stand 
in little, or at least in no direct, relation to each other. 
The lesson is plain. When the serious business of 
life is begun few men find time or inclination to refresh 
the spirit and to restore its energy, and so for many 
human beings any but the most routine existence 
comes to an end when the original store of potential 



2Q4 CONTACT WITH TEE FIRST-RATE 

energy is exhausted. On the other hand, the life 
whose potential energy is constantly renewed and in- 
creased by helpful service, by sober reflection, and by 
continued study, may, and will, continue to keep its 
trajectory high above the ground for decade after 
decade. 

What has been done here at the university by way 
of preparation, and for the nurture of mind and char- 
acter, is not an end, but a beginning only. To stop 
now storing up energy, and material convertible into 
energy, means that the really useful part of your lives 
will be over in another score of years. The present 
stock of intellectual fuel will then be exhausted in all 
but a very few cases in each thousand. 

Both ambition and the instinct of self-preservation 
unite, therefore, in insisting that we shall labor to 
keep ourselves intellectually and morally alert, that 
we shall not exhaust our powers or let them rust 
through neglect, but that we shall so use them that 
they constantly gain in effectiveness as experience 
heightens their possibilities. To do this is to gain 
success in life, whether one's place in the world be 
conspicuous or humble. 

Refreshment and vigor of mind and spirit will come 
most surely from observance of those ancient words of 
counsel, than which none are wiser: 

Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, 
whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure; whatso- 
ever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if 
there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things. 



XXXII 
INTEGRITY 



Address on Commencement Day, June 2, 1909 



INTEGRITY 

One of the best known of the Odes of Horace is that 
which begins with the line 

Integer vitse scelerisque purus. 

Whether the poet was serious, or, as some think, in a 
jocular vein, when he wrote this ode, makes little 
difference; his famous line has been read for centuries 
in tribute to integrity. 

What higher reward can come to a man than to have 
it justly said of him that he possessed integrity ? This 
means that his nature was upright, sound, complete; 
that there were no great gaps in his moral armor, and 
no weak spots in his stock of intellectual convictions. 
The man who possesses integrity must not only be 
incorruptible — that goes without saying; he must also 
be just, clear-sighted, and wise with the wisdom which 
attaches to a tried experience. 

Lack of moral integrity is as sad as it is common. 
Sometimes it is one solicitation, sometimes another, 
which successfully assails a man's completeness and 
leaves him imperfect, broken, soiled. Lack of intel- 
lectual integrity is no less sad. It implies the absence 
of a body of principles on which one's knowledge and 
convictions rest. It implies a lack of stability of pur- 
pose; a fitfulness, which leaves one to be borne hither 

297 



298 INTEGRITY 

and yon by the blasts of temporary opinion or by the 
forces of everlasting selfishness. 

The training which a university gives is poor stuff 
indeed if it has not asserted integrity alike of mind and 
of character as an attainable ideal, and if it has not 
aided in its upbuilding. 

There is a subtle and often clever type of mind 
whose activity does great damage to integrity by its 
narrow distinctions, its cunning splitting of hairs, and 
its constant asserting of half-truths in place of that 
whole truth and nothing but the truth which integrity 
loves. One may learn the lesson of integrity if he will 
but open his eyes and look nature in the face; or read 
history with insight and appreciation; or move among 
men as they go about the work of the world, and 
watch the building up and the falling down of human 
character. 

There is no substitute to be found for integrity; 
money will not buy it, nor will any accumulation, 
however vast, remove the stain of its opposite. It is 
one of man's most precious possessions and it will be 
sought by high-minded and confident youth with all 
the earnestness and vigor of their being. 

Integrity has its standards, and precious, time-old 
standards they are. It will not be deceived by fraud 
and hypocrisy appearing before it in the garb of 
honesty and frankness; nor will it be misled by selfish- 
ness, calling in imitation of the stern voice of duty. 

The world is full of men who possess moral integrity 
in abundance, but who are sadly lacking in integrity 



INTEGRITY 299 

of the intellect. They have never learned the real 
meaning of the words principle and conviction. They 
do not know that the man of integrity cannot at one 
and the same time cherish contradictory opinions or 
pursue mutually exclusive aims. Their natures lack 
wholeness. They are composite men, made, like 
Joseph's coat, of many colors. The solid, substantial 
unity of mind which comes from applying to each 
problem as it arises the test of well-founded convic- 
tion is unknown to them. They pick and choose as 
they go through life, and are content to believe that 
they possess the much-desired integrity because they 
do not commit a major sin. This is self-deception at 
its worst. The man who possesses integrity is a being 
quite different from this. He has gained, either from 
instinct by habit, or through training, the power to 
think clearly, and he persists in asking of each new 
problem what solution is prescribed for it by the prin- 
ciples that he holds. He is not swept off his feet by 
the popular cry of the moment, for he knows that in 
the life of man one popular cry succeeds another with 
startling rapidity, and that all alike are apt to be quite 
meaningless and misleading. Nor is he unduly cast 
down because just now some policy in which he believes 
appears to work badly and to disappoint those who 
have most urgently pressed it forward. He knows 
that in the long run worth asserts itself, and that so 
long as history has a story to tell it has been the story 
of constant improvement in man's conditions, of in- 
creasing control by man over his environment, and of 



3 oo INTEGRITY 

new and complicated adjustments between man and 
that environment as both become more complex in 
their natures and as they touch each other at more 
points. 

I beg of you, as you go out from this university, to 
set your hearts upon intellectual as well as upon moral 
integrity, seeking a unity, a wholeness, a soundness, a 
steadfastness, a straightforwardness, which, taken to- 
gether, are integrity itself. Do not be deceived with 
frauds and shams, and do not be alarmed with clamors 
and with cries. Remember well the lessons you have 
learned from nature; remember well the lessons you 
have learned from history; remember well the lessons 
you have learned from association with your fellows 
and from observation of them; and out of these lessons 
make each for himself a foundation of indestructible 
convictions upon which to build an intellectual life of 
increasing activity and value, not only to yourselves, 
but to your kind. 



XXXIII 
INTELLECTUAL CHARITY 



Address on Commencement Day, June I, 1910 



INTELLECTUAL CHARITY 

In the veritable babel of confusion which surrounds 
us on every hand, one is tempted to turn into a sermon 
on charity an address, however brief, to those who 
are to-day leaving their university behind them. 

All forms of thought, as well as all forms of social 
and political life, are just now undergoing disturbance, 
upheaval, reconstruction. There are those who inter- 
pret these happenings and changes in terms of a new 
Renaissance, out of which are to come greater achieve- 
ments of human intelligence and human character than 
the world has yet seen. There are others who prefer 
to think that we are living in a period of decadence 
and they find in the history of the decline and fall of 
the Roman Empire an analogy to what is going on 
round about us to-day. 

It is more cheerful at least, and probably more cor- 
rect, to take the brighter rather than the darker view 
of contemporary history. But whatever view be taken 
there is abundant room for the exercise of charity and 
abundant demand for it. 

The air is filled with recriminations. On every 
hand motives are impugned, established standards are 
attacked, and proposals, however carefully studied, 
are torn to pieces by adverse and complaining critics 
before there is time to consider them fairly. There is 
hot applause for the loudest voice that makes the 

3°3 



304 INTELLECTUAL CHARITY 

lowest appeal, and there is a readiness to believe ill 
of men and institutions which is not pleasant to witness. 
Particularly are those who represent the established 
order and those who have reached positions of prom- 
inence and power, however well deserved, made the 
objects of attack and the butt of complacent ridicule. 
These may not reply in kind, and, therefore, to that 
extent the popular demand for vigorous and even em- 
bittered controversy is disappointed. Those who have 
felt the helping hand of college and of university 
should go out into the world thus occupied and thus 
interested, with the fullest possible measure of in- 
tellectual charity. The human mind has a myriad 
facets, and it rarely reflects experience and observa- 
tion in more than one of them. It takes the sum 
total of many individual pictures to tell the whole 
story of what actually happens. There is always 
room for the other point of view, and the occasions 
are rare indeed when there is not something to be said 
on the other side of any question. 

Systematic training has for one of its main pur- 
poses the giving of a poise or balance that is to keep 
men and women from merely sharing, like dumb driven 
cattle, in the stampede of the moment. To the trained 
and disciplined minds of college and university gradu- 
ates, evidence, as distinguished from assertion, ought 
to make a conclusive appeal. 

Science, however, does not appear to be able to pro- 
duce of itself fair and open mindedness, nor does litera- 
ture or law; a subtle something which may perhaps 



INTELLECTUAL CHARITY 305 

be called intellectual chanty must be added if into 
disputed questions there is to be carried not only the 
knowledge but the temperament which resolves diffi- 
culties and composes misunderstandings. 

It is unbecoming for one whose mind has been 
trained by college and university discipline to become 
the mere partisan promoter of any person or cause. 
Enthusiasm he should have in fullest measure, but not 
the narrowness approaching bigotry which prevents 
his seeing the other side and appreciating a different 
point of view. 

It must be the observation of every one that mankind 
is in a complaining mood. Ten meetings of protest 
are held for one meeting of approval; ten journalistic 
reproaches will be found for every journalistic com- 
mendation. In part, this attitude of mind and speech 
is due to superabundant egotism, but in larger part to 
lack of intellectual charity. The superabundant ego- 
tist does not like that which he cannot understand 
and cannot manage. His favorite mode of expression 
is the jeer or the sneer, and unfortunately he finds 
altogether too many amused listeners. Then, too, 
there is an odd gap or chasm between what many men 
profess to believe, between the principles which they 
profess to hold, and what they habitually do and say. 
This want of unity and harmony between profession 
and practice is a constant source of surprise and as- 
tonishment. 

The fact probably is that mankind has not yet 
become accustomed to its new responsibilities. De- 



3 o6 INTELLECTUAL CHARITY 

pendence was converted into independence with sur- 
prising speed during the centuries from the sixteenth 
to the nineteenth, and thereby a heavier load was 
put upon humanity than it had yet been trained to 
bear. Self-government; whether it be of the indi- 
vidual or of the community, remains after all these 
long years a problem full of perplexity and difficulty. 
Those of us who believe that mankind is steadily 
climbing up-hill believe that all the forces in the world 
which make for progress are preparing men for the 
better discharge of responsibility and for the more 
generous use of opportunity. We cannot deny, how- 
ever — we dare not — that there is a long road yet to 
travel. 

It is just for this reason that the greater exercise 
of intellectual charity is so sorely needed. Ignorance 
is not perhaps itself a vice, but it is the mother of 
many vices, and that partial ignorance which masquer- 
ades as knowledge is a fruitful parent of everything 
that ought not to be. 

Carry out into the round of daily life an intellectual 
charity. Do not insist upon imposing your own view 
upon a universe that is itself larger and more com- 
plicated than any view which an individual, however 
talented, can possibly hold. Try to understand that 
others are as sincere and of as high motives as yours, 
even though they appear to be moving in a quite 
different direction. 

If the colleges and universities cannot produce men 
and women who will exercise intellectual charity, and 



INTELLECTUAL CHARITY 307 

so soften the asperities and limit the controversies of 
which life is already too full, then where indeed shall 
intellectual charity be found ? 

There are many things to reflect upon on a day like 
this, but perhaps nothing is more worthy of our reflec- 
tion on this day than those traits and characteristics 
which will help to shape the ordinary happenings of 
daily life by the high influences that go out from this 
university. 



XXXIV 
THE AGE OF IRRATIONALISM 



Address on Commencement Day, June 7, 191 1 



THE AGE OF IRRATIONALISM 

It is the fashion of historians and students of history 
to fasten a particular century, or age, or epoch, both 
in the imagination and in the memory by giving to it 
a name. We know what is meant when one speaks 
of the age of Pericles, or the age of chivalry, or the 
age of reason, as in each case mankind has hit upon a 
great personality, a distinctive institution, or an intel- 
lectual movement to serve at once as label and as 
guide-post. What shall we call the time in which we 
live, and how shall we designate the intellectual move- 
ment in which this great company of men and women 
has been trained to take, I hope and believe, an effec- 
tive and an improving part ? 

This age of ours has been called the age of irration- 
alism. It is accused of oversubtlety and of preciosity, 
of impertinent self-confidence and of vulgar lack of 
respect for what has been. Irrationalism in one shape 
or another is said to furnish the dominant note for 
every department of our life, and to be as powerful 
in philosophy and in sociology as in literature. We 
are accused of having departed, and of seeking to 
depart still farther, from the approved ways and from 
established standards, and of having a feverish desire 
to find new things to say and new ways of saying 
them. 

311 



312 THE AGE OF IRRATIONALISM 

There is a good measure of truth in all this, and it 
is well to be on the lookout for the temptations and 
the dangers which our critics point out. It may well 
be that we have confounded novelty with originality 
and change with development, and that, like the an- 
cient Athenians, we spend our time in nothing else 
but either to tell or to hear some new thing. 

Certain it is that we are curiously under the influence 
of phrases, and that argument by epithet has come to 
take a high place in our ratiocination. To call a man, 
a movement, or a proposal by either a flattering or an 
obnoxious name is to remove them at once from the 
serious and thoughtful criticism of a large part of the 
population. Most persons are for or against a pro- 
posal because of what it has been called. This, of 
course, is not intelligent and it is not rational; but it 
is very common. So far as the larger public is con- 
cerned, the last half-century of science, a truly mar- 
vellous period, has made absolutely no impression on 
the thinking habit. It has destroyed many prepos- 
sessions and not a few beliefs, but it has not taught 
mankind to think. Our age is less reflective by far 
than was the eighteenth century or the first half of 
the nineteenth. Men are now so busy hunting for 
something new that they have no time to inquire what 
the word new means. 

It is odd that we should have fallen so largely into 
this mood within a short generation after the doctrine 
of evolution had taken firm hold of the minds of culti- 
vated men. If there is any one thing which that 



THE AGE OF IRRATIONALISM 313 

doctrine teaches more clearly and more insistently 
than another, it is that all true development and prog- 
ress are out of and because of what has gone before, 
and that they are to preserve, not to destroy, those 
structures, habits, tendencies, and accomplishments 
which have shown themselves physically or morally 
fit; that is, suitable or worthy. It is not easy to 
explain why the condition which surrounds us exists, 
but exist it certainly does; and the educated man or 
woman of to-day has literally to struggle against being 
swept into the current of irrationalism. 

Not long since there was a significant and amusing 
discussion in France as to why so large a proportion 
of the public men of that country come from one 
section. Many opinions were expressed, but one well- 
known social philosopher wrote that in his judgment 
the explanation was very simple. This, he said, is 
the age of the crowd and of the demagogue; that 
particular section of France provides both. Without 
either accepting this judgment or dissenting from it, 
we may be instructed by it. Whatever else this age 
may be, it certainly is the age of the crowd and of the 
demagogue. The crowd with its well-marked mental 
and moral peculiarities is everywhere in evidence; and 
demagogues political, demagogues literary, and dema- 
gogues religious din our ears with hungry cries. A 
torrent of talk is abroad in the land. The crowd just 
now, the world over, sways from right to left in policy, 
in belief, and in action, and cries out with wild en- 
thusiasm to-day for the demagogue — political, literary, 



314 TEE AGE OF IRRATIONALISM 

or religious — that it tramples under foot to-morrow. 
The art of being a demagogue appears to be easy and 
quick to learn, and the rewards of the successful prac- 
tice of the art have strange fascination for minds and 
characters that one would like to think in all respects 
worthy. But we are under no obligation either to run 
with the crowd or to follow every demagogue. 

The obvious attitude of the trained mind is not one 
of acquiescence in the temporarily popular or in the 
pursuit of the new, but one of searching for those 
basic principles revealed in the structure of human 
society and of nature, on which alone lasting policies 
and institutions can be built. To the man who does 
not think and who cannot think, the most reactionary 
proposal, if only it bear the label progressive, attracts 
as though it were a genuine advance. Selfishness and 
ambition clothed in the apparatus and nomenclature 
of virtue have great success in securing the support 
of those really disinterested and well-meaning persons 
for whom a label acts as an effective substitute for 
thought. We should not let them deceive or mis- 
lead us. 

It is, of course, not easy to think. Very few human 
beings have formed the habit of persistent thinking in 
regard to those matters which press upon their atten- 
tion and which solicit their interest and their help. 
Most of us are dominated by the newspaper head-line, 
and the men who write these head-lines are the real 
makers of current history. 

In order to think and to form the habit of thinking, 



THE AGE OF IRRATIONALISM 315 

one must have a point of departure. That point of 
departure may safely be taken in deep-rooted respect 
for what has been, for what has lasted, for what has 
charmed and delighted generation after generation 
and century after century. No one can intelligently 
face forward who has never looked intelligently back. 

The true and most useful type of conservative is one 
who, as was said of King Alfred, bases his character 
upon old facts, but who accepts new facts as a reason 
for things. Change through conviction is real intel- 
lectual progress. Change through vague yearnings, 
through nervous excitement, through following a pur- 
veyor of phrases and platitudes, through rebellion 
against the laws of nature and of man, or through 
restless inability to understand, is not progress, but 
reaction. The typical self-styled progressive of to-day 
appears to believe that any leap in the dark is better 
than standing still. So he invents novelties in politics, 
in literature, and in religion, and plays with them in 
full view of a delighted and admiring public. This is 
irrationalism in full operation. 

University study should have taught each of you 
that one of our main businesses in life is to form the 
habit of tracing facts, theories, projects, and schemes 
back to controlling principles, as well as to gain that 
genuine historical point of view which makes the 
words development and progress aglow with lively 
meaning. 

These habits will defend us from the allurements of 
irrationalism, and will aid in defeating and destroying 



316 THE AGE OF IRRATIONALISM 

% it. The power of robust and independent thinking is 
irrationalism's mortal enemy. 

If those who go out from the universities are not 
proof against irrationalism, what hope is there for the 
less fortunate and the less advantaged ? One who, de- 
spite his training, feels a temptation to yield to irra- 
tionalism because it is popular and easy, may perhaps 
take a hint from Doctor Johnson. "I am sometimes 
troubled," said Boswell, "by a disposition to stingi- 
ness." "So am I," replied Johnson, "but I do not 
tell it." 



XXXV 
SUCCESS 



Address on Commencement Day, June 5, 19 1 2 



SUCCESS 

Another great army of men and women, filled, I 
am sure, with ambition and with hope, is about to 
march out through the gates of this university. Years 
of preparation, in some cases general, in others highly 
special and particular, lie behind. What does the 
future hold ? Whither are we tending, what use, 
what application, are we to make of it all ? One 
word springs almost inevitably to the lips of ardent 
youth: "My one wish is to be successful." When 
life's race is run and the account is made up once for 
all, everything will be found to hang upon the meaning 
of this word " success." As each individual interprets 
the object of his ambition, so will he mould his char- 
acter. As each individual moulds his character, so 
will he leave a good or an evil repute behind, or pass 
through life unnoticed and unmarked. 

"Success," said the poet iEschylus, "is man's god." 
What seers, what diviners of human nature and of its 
everlasting forms those ancient Greeks were ! Truly 
success is man's god, and modern man worships that 
god far more devotedly and far more whole-heartedly 
than he worships Deity itself. Everything turns then 
on whether success is interpreted in terms of disci- 
plined character, of generous service, and of real accom- 
plishment, or whether it is measured in the base coin 
of greed, of passing popularity, or of the glamour of 

3 J 9 



320 SUCCESS 

position which, like a rocket, only bursts into bright- 
ness to die in the dark. 

A man's attitude toward success and his interpreta- 
tion of it may easily change with his environment. In 
an age of predominant interest in letters and in art, a 
Dante and a Michael Angelo are successful, as are a 
Shakspere and a Rembrandt. In an age of discovery 
and of invention, the pendulum of attention swings 
to the philosophers and the men of science who blaze 
the way for new paths. In an age of commerce 
and of industry, requiring for their prosecution all 
the resources of huge amassments of capital, human 
interest passes to those who are the possessors of the 
greatest accumulations. The successful man of one 
age may in another be a mendicant even for reputa- 
tion and for honor. 

Man's chief responsibility is not for external things 
of any sort. It is for his inner self, for his standards, 
and his attitude to those many enticing things that 
lie without. Conduct is the one sure test of character, 
and success is only to be judged in terms of conduct. 
When the great ship Titanic, a veritable Vanity Fair, 
went staggering to its awful doom, merchant prince 
and pauper were alike stripped of their acquisitions 
and were left standing side by side as human souls 
to face death clad only in their characters. 

Surely the world is old enough and man's experience 
is long and wide and deep enough to make all this 
unforgetable. Yet how constantly it is forgotten ! On 
every hand we see men's characters offered for sale at 



SUCCESS 321 

the price of a paltry and passing gain. One sells his 
character for dollars; another for the soothing shouts 
of the populace; another for position and power, 
which, however high, are dishonored by the fact of 
their purchase at the cost of even a single human 
virtue. 

That character which guides conduct to true success 
is a disciplined character. It is not fitful, or wayward, 
or blown about by every wind of doctrine, or moved 
by every change of circumstance. Discipline involves 
standards. The application of standards implies rules. 
A disciplined character, therefore, is a character which 
has fixed standards leading to definite rules of con- 
duct. Unless life and study in a university have 
taught this lesson, the university has failed in its high 
purpose. The pressure for training to enable one to 
earn a living is all well enough in its way, but those 
who have not learned how to live will be of no benefit 
to civilization and of little value to themselves simply 
because they have learned how to make a living. 

We need in our individual lives, and we sadly need in 
our national and international life, sobriety, stability, 
dignity of mind and of conduct. Of much that we 
see about us on every hand we must say, as Junius 
wrote to the Duke of Grafton: "I do not give you to 
posterity as a pattern to imitate, but as an example 
to deter. ,, 

When we are told that to resist some strongly urged 
movement is unpopular; that to hold fast to some 
principle which all human experience testifies to as 



322 SUCCESS 

sound is to be behind the times; or that to fail to 
join in the shouts of some gathered multitude is to 
cut oneself off from influence and from power — a bid 
is being made for our characters. It is being assumed 
that they are for sale and that enough of these coins 
will buy them. Unfortunately, in too many cases 
that assumption is justified. Very many men, un- 
happily, are not able to withstand the temptation of 
immediate advantage. Their characters are undisci- 
plined. Whatever may be their professions they have 
no real principles. They are without standards to 
which in time of doubt they resort for guidance and 
for the measurement of conduct. No university can 
justify itself if it goes on multiplying the number of 
such as these. It can only be justified if, under its 
influence, under its inspiration, and under its guidance, 
learning is crystallized into wisdom and character is 
built upon a sure foundation. When, as Seneca puts 
it, "successful and fortunate crime is called virtue," 
we are a long way from any lasting civilization. 

We are yet at school, all of us; and we are but 
beginners at the great task of learning how to be men 
and women. Good animals, useful animals, many of 
us are; but the world stands sadly in need of real men 
and women, of which there are all too few. I mean 
men and women whose judgment is cautious but firm; 
whose intelligence is quick but sound; and whose 
characters are gracious but stable. It is only by the 
making of men and women such as these that our 
university shall be justified of its children. 



XXXVI 
THOROUGHNESS 



Address on Commencement Day, June 4, 1913 



THOROUGHNESS 

Once more the gates of the university swing outward 
that these hundreds of young men and women may go 
forth into what is euphemistically styled the world. 
They carry with them, we all hope, happy and welcome 
memories of their life at Columbia, as well as no small 
burden of treasure that has been laid up while here. 
In that burden of treasure it is important that what 
Tennyson has called the thorough-edged intellect be 
found. 

Thoroughness grows more necessary as it becomes 
less fashionable. Sound and disciplined thinking is 
hard to sustain in an atmosphere filled with the snap- 
ping sparks of rapidly following emotional outbursts. 
The patient examination of evidence is not easy at a 
time when trial by newspaper elbows to one side the 
slower process of trial by jury. The careful study of 
all that is involved in a proposal for some new sort of 
action in morals, in politics, or in society, is at a disad- 
vantage when public attention is dragged quickly from 
one point of the emotional compass to another, and 
when masses of men, intent only on what they wish to 
get away from, have no sort of care for what they are 
going toward. Just now gossip displaces conversa- 
tion; vice and loathsome disease are extolled as worthy 
of discussion in the drawing-room and of presentation 
on the stage; absorption in current topics (which to- 

3 2 S 



326 THOROUGHNESS 

morrow may be neither current nor topics) leaves no 
place for the genuine study of that history and that 
literature which have withstood Horace's fuga tern- 
forum. Every ruling tendency is to make life a 
Flat-land, an affair of two dimensions, with no depth, 
no background, no permanent roots. 

For all this there is no support to be found in the 
study of science, of history, of literature, or of philoso- 
phy; least of all, in the lessons taught by the majestic 
doctrine of evolution. Each and all of these insists 
unendingly on thoroughness and on standards of excel- 
lence. There can be no doubt, however, that we mod- 
erns have lost much of the old respect for thorough- 
ness. We seem to think that superficial brilliancy 
counts for more. 

It is of vital importance for those who are just now 
forming their habits of mind and of conduct, and who 
are making for themselves a view of the world, to 
ponder all this and to realize what it means. He 
would be a poor scientist indeed who should describe 
the ocean in terms of its superficial currents, its calms, 
its storms, and its tempests only. The dark, silent 
depths, with their rich remains of ages that are past 
and with forms of life all their own, exerting as they 
do a profound influence on the habitable globe, would 
count for nothing in such a judgment. Or he would, 
likewise, be a poor scientist who should describe the 
earth's envelope in terms of the air which man breathes 
at or near the surface of the earth. The stupendous 
problems of physics, of chemistry, of mechanics, of 



THOROUGHNESS 327 

astronomy, that grow out of and are illuminated by 
the characteristics of the upper atmosphere and of the 
ether, would go unnoted. In similar fashion the 
estimation of man's individual and social conduct in 
terms of his swiftly succeeding emotions fails to take 
account of the fundamental facts and laws that grow 
out of the nature of intellect and the necessities of 
character. Present feeling is by no means all that 
there is of life, although too often many are persuaded 
that it is so. The making of civilization is a gigantic 
task upon which the past, the present, and the future 
are all engaged, and in which the past, the present, 
and the future all have an interest, out of which inter- 
ests grow rights. The observer of the surface of life, 
the impressionist, does not get an understanding of 
things as they are, but only of things as they at the 
moment appear to be. 

If this university has not taught to every graduate 
to whom it offers to-day the hand of fellowship the 
lasting lesson of thoroughness, it has in so far failed no 
matter what else it may have done for him. He who 
has schooled himself to go to the bottom of things, to 
follow up every hint, and to pursue to its end each 
implication, has begun to get a true notion of the 
interdependence of nature and of life. In this way 
he learns the lesson that beneath superficial differences 
lie hidden, yet controlling, likenesses and unities. He 
comes to understand that however diffused the light 
of experience may seem to be, in reality it comes from 
a single source. He catches sight of the significance 







28 THOROUGHNESS 



of principles, rules, laws, and he finds out how these 
principles, rules, laws manifest themselves in various 
and diverse ways that are a part of their life but not 
all of it. 

The thorough-edged intellect is one that has learned 
these lessons and that has formed the habit of acting 
upon them. It is not satisfied with assertion demand- 
ing to be accepted as proof; with desire urging that 
it be identified with need; or with tumultuous clamor 
claiming to usurp the place of sober and reflective 
public opinion. It asks for reasons, it seeks for con- 
trolling principles, and it knows how to set about 
getting them. It is my earnest hope that these lessons 
of thoroughness have been so well learned and so 
pondered that they will shape the life and conduct of 
each one of you, and thereby bring new strength and 
new satisfaction both to yourselves and to the com- 
munities that you will serve. 



XXXVII 
LIBERTY 



Address on Commencement Day, June 3, 1914 



LIBERTY 

It is a matter of no small concern to those who leave 
this university to-day for the purpose of entering upon 
the active work of life to realize what ideas and pur- 
poses are just now dominant in the minds of men and 
how these differ from those that have gone before. In 
the evolution of human ideas a curious cycle is observ- 
able. Beliefs and tendencies that have once appeared 
and that have been rejected or outgrown tend to re- 
appear, sometimes in a new guise, with all the fresh- 
ness of youth, and they are then acclaimed by those 
unfamiliar with their history as symbols of an advanc- 
ing civilization. Probably the greatest waste recorded 
anywhere in human history is that which results 
from the attempt to do over again what has once been 
done and found disappointing or harmful. If the 
study of history were more real and more vital than 
it is ordinarily made, and if it showed ideas, tendencies, 
and institutions in their unfolding and orderly devel- 
opment, and if the lessons of history so studied were 
really learned and hearkened to, the world would be 
saved an almost infinite amount of loss, of suffering, 
and of discouragement. 

When this college was young, the word that rose 
oftenest and instinctively to the lips was liberty. 
Men were then everywhere seeking for ways and 

33i 



332 LIBERTY 

means to throw off trammels which had been placed 
upon them by institutions of long standing but which 
were found to hamper them at every turn and to hem 
them in on every side. Liberty in those days meant 
not one thing, but many things. It meant freedom of 
conscience, of speech, and of the press; it meant par- 
ticipation in the acts of government and in the choice 
of governing agents; it meant freedom to move about 
over the world, to seek one's own fortune under strange 
skies and in foreign lands, there to live the life that 
one's own mind and conscience selected as most suit- 
able. Liberty was then the watchword, not in the new 
world alone by any means, but in the old world as well 
and particularly in France, which has so often pointed 
the way of advance in the march of ideas. Standing 
in his place in the Convention during the fateful spring 
of 1793, Robespierre pronounced this definition of 
liberty which is almost the best of its kind: "Liberty 
is the power which of right belongs to every man to 
use all his faculties as he may choose. Its rule is 
justice; its limits are the rights of others; its prin- 
ciples are drawn from Nature itself; its protector is 
the law." Whatever judgment may be passed upon 
Robespierre's conduct, certainly his thought on this 
fundamental question of liberty was clear and sound. 

But during the years that have passed we have 
moved far away from this view of what is important 
in life. There has grown up, not alone in America, 
but throughout the world, an astonishingly wide-spread 
belief in the value of regulation and restriction, not 



LIBERTY 333 

only as a substitute for liberty, but directly in opposi- 
tion to it. That against which the leaders of the race 
revolted a century and more ago is now pressed upon 
us in another form as a desirable end at which to aim. 
Not liberty, but regulation and restriction, are the 
watchwords of to-day, and they are made so in what 
is sincerely believed to be the greater public interest. 
John Stuart Mill, in his classic essay On Liberty saw 
and described these tendencies nearly fifty years ago, 
but even his clear vision did not foresee the length to 
which restrictions on liberty have now been carried. 

Just as the driving force of an engine is to be found 
in the steam-chest and not in the brake, so the driving 
force in civilization will be found in liberty and not in 
restriction. The cycle will, in due time and after a 
colossal waste of energy and of accomplishment, com- 
plete itself, and liberty will once more displace regula- 
tion and restriction as the dominant idea in the minds 
of men. It is worth your while to take note, there- 
fore, that while liberty is not now in the foreground of 
human thinking and human action, it cannot long be 
kept out of the place which of right and of necessity 
belongs to it. 

The only logical and legitimate restriction upon 
liberty is that which is drawn from the like liberty of 
others. That men may live together in family, in 
society, and in the state, liberty must be so self-disci- 
plined and so self-controlled that it avoids even the 
appearance of license or of tyranny. 

There are three possible ways of viewing and of 



334 LIBERTY 

stating the relationship between the individual and 
the group or mass of which he forms a part. 

In the first place, each individual may be regarded as 
an end in himself whose purposes are to be accom- 
plished at all hazards and quite regardless of what 
happens to his fellows. This is that extreme form of 
individualism which has always ended, and must al- 
ways end, in physical conflict, in cruel bloodshed, in 
violent anarchy, and in the triumph of brute force. 
It does not provide a soil in which ideas can flourish. 

In the second place, each individual may be regard- 
ed as a mere nothing, a negligible quantity, while the 
group or mass, with its traditions, its beliefs, and its 
rituals, is exalted to the place of honor and almost of 
worship. The logical and necessary result of this view 
has always been, and must always be, from the stand- 
point of human accomplishment in institutions, stag- 
nation, powerlessness, and failure. It is this view of 
life which has from time immemorial held so many of 
the great peoples of the Orient in its grip and which 
has set them in sharp contrast with the active and 
advancing life of the West for nearly two thousand 
years past. 

The third view of the relationship of the individual 
man to the group or mass is the one that I would press 
upon you as offering the fullest measure of individual 
happiness and achievement and the greatest amount 
of public good. It stands between the philosophy of 
self-assertion, of disorder, of brute force, and of an- 
archy on the one hand, and the stagnation of an un- 



LIBERTY 335 

progressive civilization on the other. It is the view 
which emphasizes the individual to the utmost but 
which finds the conception of each individual's per- 
sonality and accomplishment in his relations to his 
fellows and in his service to his kind. "He that loseth 
his life shall find it," is alike the last word of eth- 
ical philosophy and the supreme appeal to Christian 
morals. The enrichment and the development of the 
individual, in order not that he may acquire but that 
he may give; in order not that he may antagonize 
but that he may conciliate; in order not that he may 
overcome and trample under foot but that he may 
help and serve — this, as distinguished from the philos- 
ophy of disorder on the one hand and the philosophy 
of stagnation on the other — I call the constructive 
philosophy of the institutional life. It is built upon 
human individuality as a corner-stone and a founda- 
tion. The higher and loftier the structure rises, the 
more plainly it points upward, the heavier is the 
burden that the foundation bears, and the greater is 
its service to God and to man. 



XXXVIII 
THE OPEN MIND 



Address on Commencement Day, June 2, 191 5 



THE OPEN MIND 

In what spirit and in what attitude of mind the 
problems of practical life shall be approached by men 
and women who have had the benefit of the discipline 
and the instruction of a university are matters of 
grave concern to those charged with the university's 
oversight and direction. It is quite possible that one 
may be so assiduous in negligence and so skilful as to 
carry away from his college or university study little 
or nothing that will aid him to take a just, a sympa- 
thetic, and a helpful attitude toward the questions 
which life insistently asks. On the other hand, it is 
easily possible, and it should be normal and most 
usual, for the student to take with him from his college 
and university residence very much that will give him 
important advantage over his less fortunate fellows in 
estimating and in passing judgment upon men, upon 
tendencies, upon ideas, and upon human institutions. 
If he has gained from his study and discipline a mas- 
tery over method, a trained habit of withholding 
judgment until the evidence has been heard, a moral 
standard that knows instinctively the difference be- 
tween right and wrong and that leads him to turn to 
the one as surely as it causes him to recoil from the 
other, then the university has furnished him well. 

But granted the possession of these habits and 
traits, it is essential to beware of the closed mind. 

339 



340 THE OPEN MIND 

The closed mind is not of itself conservative or radical, 
destructive or constructive; it is merely a mental 
attitude which may be any one of these or all of them 
in turn. By the closed mind I mean a mind which has 
a fixed formula with which to reach a quick and certain 
answer to every new question, and a mind for which 
all the great issues of life are settled once for all and 
their settlements organized into carefully ordered 
dogma. To the closed mind the world is a finished 
product and nothing remains but its interested con- 
templation. The closed mind may be jostled, but it 
cannot have experience. The name of a notable 
historic family, the house of Bourbon, has passed 
into familiar speech with the definition of one who 
forgets nothing and who learns nothing. The Bour- 
bon typifies the closed mind. 

There is another type of mind equally to be shunned. 
To be sure this type of mind is not closed, for, unfor- 
tunately, it is quite open at both ends. This is the 
type which remembers nothing and which learns 
nothing. To it the name of no historic family has 
yet been given. There is every prospect, however, 
that some contemporary name may, through constant 
association with this type of mind, yet become as 
distinguished and as familiar in the speech of our 
grandchildren as the name of the house of Bourbon 
is distinguished and familiar to us. 

Open-mindedness is a trait greatly to be desired. 
It differs both from the closed mind and from the 
mind which consists wholly of openings. The open 



THE OPEN MIND 341 

mind is ready to receive freely and fairly, and to 
estimate new facts, new ideas, new movements, new 
teachings, new tendencies; but while it receives these 
it also estimates them. It does not yield itself wholly 
to the new until it has assured itself that the new is 
also true. It does not reject that which is old and 
customary and usual until it is certain that it is also 
false or futile. 

The power to estimate implies the existence of 
standards of worth and their application to the new 
experiences of the open mind. These standards are 
themselves the product of older and longer experiences 
than ours, and they form the subject-matter of the 
lesson which the whole past teaches the immediate 
present. 

History offers a third dimension to the superficial 
area of knowledge that each individual acquires 
through his own experience. When one proclaims 
that he is not bound by any trammels of the past, he 
reveals the fact that he is both very young and very 
foolish. Such an one would, if he could, reduce him- 
self to the intellectual level of the lower animals. He 
can only mean by such a declaration that he proposes 
to set out to discover and to explain the world of nature 
and of man on his own account and as if nothing had 
been done before him. He also jauntily assumes his 
own certain competence for this mighty and self- 
imposed task. His egotism is as magnificent as his 
wisdom is wanting. Such an one possesses neither 
an open mind nor a closed mind, but a mind open at 



342 TEE OPEN MIND 

both ends through which a stream of sensation and 
feeling will pour without leaving any more permanent 
conscious impression than the lapping waves leave on 
the sandy shore. 

The man of open mind, on the contrary, while 
keenly alive to the experiences of the present, will 
eagerly search the records of the past for their lessons, 
in order that he may be spared from trying to do over 
again what has once been proved useless, wasteful, or 
wrong. The man of open mind will watch the rise 
and fall of nations; the struggle of human ambition, 
greed, and thirst for power; the loves and hates of 
men and women as these have affected the march of 
events; the migrations of peoples; the birth, develop- 
ment, and application of ideas; the records of human 
achievement in letters, in the arts, and in science; the 
speculations and the beliefs of man as to what lies 
beyond the horizon of sense, with a view to seeking a 
firm foundation for the fabric of his own knowledge 
and his own faith. His open-mindedness will manifest 
itself in hearkening to the testimony of other men, 
other peoples, and other ages, as well as in reflecting 
upon and weighing the evidence of his own short-lived 
and very limited senses. 

There is a great difference between being intellectual 
and being intelligent. Not a few intellectual persons 
are quite unintelligent, and very many intelligent per- 
sons would hardly be classed as intellectual. One of 
the chief manifestations of intelligence is open-minded- 
ness. The intelligent man is open-minded enough to 



THE OPEN MIND 343 

see the point of view of those who do not agree with 
him and to enter in some measure into their feelings 
and convictions. He is able, also, to view the con- 
flicting arguments and phenomena in proportion to 
each other and to rank the less significant of these 
below the more significant. It is quite possible to be 
intellectual and to manifest the closed mind; but it is 
not possible to do so and to be intelligent. 

It is the constant aim of this college and university, 
by act and by precept, to hold up the value of open- 
mindedness and to train students in ways of intelli- 
gence. This university is the product of liberty, and 
it is passionately devoted to liberty. It finds in 
liberty the justification and the ground for open- 
mindedness, and also the source of those dangers 
which it is the business of the educated man to avoid. 
Open-mindedness in the university teaches the habit 
of open-mindedness in later life. Genuine open-mind- 
edness guides to progress based upon wisdom. That 
each one of you may have caught something of this 
spirit and may constantly and effectively manifest it 
in the years to come is our earnest wish and hope. 



XXXIX 
THE KINGDOM OF LIGHT 



Address on Commencement Day, June 7, 1916 



THE KINGDOM OF LIGHT 

It is our good fortune that there are in America 
men who do not permit the pressure of public service 
or of private business wholly to separate them from 
the intellectual life. About a quarter of a century 
ago, a group of such men made a visit to a farm near 
Phantom Lake in Wisconsin. The attraction of the 
lake proved so alluring and the occasion so enjoyable 
that the visit was repeated year after year. At each 
of these annual reunions some one of the company 
read a paper for the inspiration and to the delight of 
his associates. Some twenty years ago an eloquent 
and scholarly leader of the American bar, who was 
weighted heavily with professional responsibilities and 
who constantly rendered notable public service, took 
as the subject for one of these Phantom Club papers 
"The Kingdom of Light." The little-known essay 
which he then read is a priceless contribution to 
American literature. Like the almost equally un- 
known essay of John J. Ingalls on "The Blue Grass," 
it makes a sincere, a powerful, and a gracious expres- 
sion of what is best and most natural in the thought 
of the unspoiled American. 

The kingdom of light, as the writer of that paper 
described it, is an invisible commonwealth which out- 
lives the storms of ages. It is a state whose arma- 
ments are thoughts, whose weapons are ideas, and 

347 



348 THE KINGDOM OF LIGHT 

whose trophies are the pages of the world's great 
masters. Toward this kingdom the steps of his asso- 
ciates were directed with subtly guiding thought and 
with singularly beautiful expression. 

To-day a company of young men and young women, 
numbered by hundreds and almost by thousands, is 
about to march out from this great fortress of the 
mind and soul to undertake the invasion and the 
conquest of life. I beg of you in that march to turn 
your footsteps constantly and untiringly toward the 
kingdom of light. The world abounds in great cities, 
in broad plains, in rich mines, in ample opportunities 
for what we call personal and professional success; but 
all these are as Dead Sea fruit if we have not found 
our way, each one of us, into the kingdom of light. 
It is doubly hard just now to seek the protection and 
the seclusion of that kingdom. The world is roaring 
round about us; the noise and the darkness of a great 
tempest fills our ears and blinds our eyes. It needs 
patience, it needs courage, it needs real character, at 
such a time even to remember that there is a kingdom 
of light and that we wish to possess it. 

Every possible excuse is always ready to offer itself 
for leaving undone those things that ought to be done. 
Lack of time, pressure of practical life, the needs of 
the moment, are all urged as reasons why we cannot 
make our way to the kingdom of light and enjoy it as 
we should like to do. After granting all that may be 
justly claimed for lack of time, after granting all that 
may be urged on behalf of the practical needs of the 



THE KINGDOM OF LIGHT 349 

moment, it remains true that the man who allows his 
mental and spiritual nature to stagnate and to decay 
does not do so from lack of time or from the pressure 
of other things, but from lack of inclination. To enter 
into the kingdom of light, to live with great thoughts, 
to enjoy the beauty of letters and of art, to absorb the 
experience and to share the ambitions and the hopes 
of mankind, all this is primarily a matter of character 
and of will. The material obstacles that stand in the 
way of its accomplishment are too often sternly pres- 
ent, but they are far from insurmountable. Effort, 
persistent directed effort, will bring us quickly to the 
kingdom of light and keep us within its kindly gov- 
ernance. 

The philosophers rule the world, and they have 
always ruled it since philosophy began. The man of 
action may not know whence his ruling ideas and 
purposes come; he may not even know what those 
ruling ideas and purposes are. Nevertheless, they are 
there and they are ruling. They may be the product 
of a good philosophy, or they may be the product 
of a bad philosophy; but of some philosophy they 
are certainly the product. Ideas direct conduct. He 
who has entered into the kingdom of light moves easily 
and in friendly converse among ideas. He chooses 
those that he would have guide him in his daily busi- 
ness. At nightfall, perhaps, he retires within the quiet 
boundaries of this kingdom to refresh himself anew 
by pondering, by weighing again those thoughts that 
console, and those thoughts that elevate. 



35© THE KINGDOM OF LIGHT 

There is no such thing as a common, a humdrum, or 
a sterile life, unless we make it so ourselves. "The 
rainbow and the rose," says my author, "will give 
their colors to all alike. The sense of beauty that is 
born in every soul pleads for permission to remain 
there." If we will but look for it, there is something 
ennobling and uplifting in every vocation to which a 
man can put his hand. Every activity of life has its 
material aspect and its spiritual aspect. It has its 
result in visible accomplishment and it also has its 
result in invisible mind-building, will-building, and 
intellectual enjoyment. 

Just now we have been speaking much of a little 
town on the river Avon, a town which, compared with 
London, with Manchester, with Liverpool, is negligible 
in size; but we have been speaking of Stratford be- 
cause the fortunes and the influence of letters are indis- 
solubly linked with it. It is a capital city of the 
kingdom of light. It is not potent as are the cities of 
commerce and of capital and the homes of great popu- 
lations; but when the rising tide of time has swept all 
these into the valley of forgetfulness the capital cities 
of the kingdom of light will remain safely seated upon 
their high hills. 

It is into this kingdom that I would have each son 
and daughter of Columbia enter. Its gates are many 
and various, its high places are of different kinds and 
of different ages, but from them all one looks eastward 
to to-morrow's rising sun. The purpose of perform- 
ance is to pave the way for new promise; the purpose 



THE KINGDOM OF LIGHT 351 

in looking back is to fix the direction of the line that 
guides us in moving forward. If we can but learn the 
lessons that the kingdom of light has to teach, if we 
can but share the enjoyment and the elevation of spirit 
that the kingdom of light has to offer, we shall be made 
wise and strong for new accomplishment that will 
bring to man new comfort, new happiness, and new 
satisfaction. 

In setting out upon this journey, you carry with 
you the blessing and the good-will of the university of 
your choice. 



XL 
A WORLD IN FERMENT 



Address on Commencement Day, June 6, 191 7 



A WORLD IN FERMENT 

The hundreds, indeed the thousands, of American 
youths who pass out from this university to-day go 
into a new and a strange world. It is more than a 
world at war; it is a world in ferment. From the 
steppes of Russia all the way across Europe and 
America and around to Japan and China men and 
nations are not only engaged in a titanic military 
struggle but they are also examining and, when neces- 
sary, quickly readjusting and reorganizing their cus- 
tomary habits of thought and of action, private as 
well as public. It is not easy, perhaps it is impossible, 
to find an Ariadne who will give us a guiding thread 
through this labyrinth of change. Presuppositions 
that have long sustained the solid fabric of personal 
and of national conduct have been destroyed. As- 
sumptions that have seemed to be made certain by the 
earlier progress of man have disappeared under the 
pressure of the latest manifestations of trained human 
capacity for evil. 

Before such a scene the timid will despair, while the 
reckless will affect an indifference that they cannot 
really feel. The wise will follow a different course. 
They will not be hurried into judging of normal man 
on the basis of his latest abnormalities, and they will 
not permit themselves to forget all that human history 
teaches because the happenings of the moment seem 

355 



356 A WORLD IN FERMENT 

to teach something quite different. The wise will not 
lose their sense of proportion in judging of events in 
time, in space, or in circumstance. 

Each individual whose training has really reached 
the depths of his nature, and so has formed his habits 
of thought and of action, will first examine his own 
relation to what is going on in the world, and will next 
inquire how that which is going on is to be judged in 
terms of everlasting standards of right and of wrong, 
of progress, and of decline. He will first of all find 
himself to be a member of a politically organized group 
which is a nation. He will find himself beholden to 
that group, to its traditions, to its ideals, and to its 
highest interests, not as a parasite but as a strengthen- 
ing and a contributing force. Recognition of this 
relationship will be the basis of his loyalty, and the 
measure of his loyalty will be not lip-service but 
sacrifice. He will in this way discover that the ends 
of which his group or nation is in search are the ends 
that he must strive to accomplish. It will not be diffi- 
cult for him to see that in most cases, in the vast 
majority of cases, these ends are to be reached by 
persuasion, by argument, by consent, but that in the 
last resort, if they be ends on which turns the whole 
future of mankind, they must, if need be, find protec- 
tion and defense in physical and military force. This 
is a sad but significant evidence of the incomplete de- 
velopment of mankind. 

He will next apply the standards of moral excellence 
and approval to the present-day conduct of men and 



A WORLD IN FERMENT 357 

of nations, with a view to determining whether the 
changes that are going forward are making for human 
progress or for human decline. He will be led to 
answer this question by the relative importance ac- 
corded to ideas and ideals. If men and nations are 
engaged in a blind struggle for material gain, for mere 
conquest, for revenge, or for future privileges, then 
what is going on is in high degree a manifestation of 
bestiality in man. If, on the other hand, the struggle 
be one for the establishment on the largest possible 
scale, in the securest possible way, of those institu- 
tions and opportunities which make man free, then the 
contest rises to the sublime. In this latter case every 
contestant on behalf of such a cause is a hero, and 
every one who offers his life and his strength and his 
substance is a sincere lover of his kind. 

It may therefore well be that it is for the issue of 
this war to determine whether mankind is still in 
progress or has begun his decline. If the moral, the 
economic, and the physical power of men and of 
nations that love freedom is adequate to its establish- 
ment on a secure basis, then mankind is still in prog- 
ress and new vistas of satisfaction and of accomplish- 
ment are to be spread out before him. If, on the other 
hand, the strength of men and of nations that love 
freedom is not adequate to this severe task, then man 
has crossed the Great Divide of his political history 
and is to begin a descent into those dark places where 
force and cruelty and despotism wreak their will. 
Nothing less than this is the alternative which now 



358 A WORLD IN FERMENT 

confronts not alone the nations of the earth, but every 
individual in each one of those nations. The respon- 
sibility for action and for service cannot be devolved 
upon some one else, least of all can it be devolved upon 
government officials and government agencies. These 
have their great part to play, but in last resort the 
issue will be decided, not by governments, not even 
by armies and by navies, but by men and women who 
are the support of all these and whose convictions and 
stern action are the foundation upon which govern- 
ment and armies and navies rest. 

Let there be no faltering by any son or daughter of 
Columbia. The clock time is about to strike the most 
portentous hour in all history. May each child of 
this ancient university take inspiration and courage 
from Alma Mater herself, who in her long life has in 
time of trouble never wavered, in time of danger 
never hesitated, in time of difficulty never doubted, 
May all her children be forever worthy of her ! 



XLI 

NEW VALUES 



Address on Commencement Day, June 5, 1918 



NEW VALUES 

The university which assembles to-day to mark 
the passing of another year is sadly depleted in num- 
bers. Nearly 350 officers of administration and in- 
struction have put aside their academic duties in 
order to enter the military or naval service of the 
United States or to take part in some other public 
work essential to winning the war. Our roll of stu- 
dents has fallen from more than 22,800 to less than 
19,500, and each week sees new groups of both men 
and women turning from their tasks here to accept 
some form of public service. We would not have it 
otherwise. The greater the university's sacrifice, the 
greater the university's service. The spirit of 1776 
and the spirit of 1861 are fortunately no less potent 
here in this twentieth century than when they first 
found expression. The loyal devotion of Columbia 
University and its zeal for service are to-day writing 
a new and proud chapter of our academic history. 

What can be said to those who remain to take part 
in these commencement exercises that has not already 
been said an hundred times and in an hundred ways ? 

The world now understands the issue with which it 

is faced, and to none is it probably more clear and 

definite than to those who are this day to close the 

period of their formal academic study. But we must 

take note that amid all the evils and horrors and out- 

361 



362 NEW VALUES 

rages of this war there are to be seen a few fortunate 
accidents. Whole nations find themselves exalted to 
new and lofty planes of noble feeling and of generous 
emulation in sacrifice. Myriads of men and women 
count as nothing the luxuries and comforts upon 
which they had grown to depend, in order that they 
may find some post of public usefulness and devotion. 
The universal ambition is to be as near the firing-line 
as possible. These facts indicate that the rude shock 
of war has been effective to establish a new scale of 
values. Material gain, great authority, noteworthy 
power, comfortable ease, have all been cast aside for 
something that is found to be more valuable still. 

The heart of man has made an articulate cry, and 
the world has heard it ! It is a cry for those funda- 
mental things that lie at the very foundation of a 
reasonable and a moral life. It is a cry for the pro- 
tection of the weak against the strong. It is a cry for 
the enforcement of human law and for the establish- 
ment of human justice. It is a cry for the protection 
of a nation's plighted word against those who would 
treat it, when convenience demands, as only a scrap 
of paper! It is a cry for freedom, for liberty, for 
opportunity to live a life of one's own choice and 
making, provided only that every other man's equal 
right be not restricted thereby. For these things men 
and nations are ready to sacrifice all that they possess, 
and to kill their fellow men whom they have not seen 
and whom they do not know, in order that of these 
things they may not be deprived. 



NEW VALUES 363 

Nations do not go to war over the multiplication 
table, or the Julian calendar, or the metric system, or 
the precise day and hour at which a total eclipse of 
the sun takes place. All of these matters are highly 
important to the conduct and disposition of civilized 
life and to the convenience of man; but no one of 
them, not ten thousand other facts like them, grip 
men's souls and stir their spirits as does the slightest 
happening that marks a wrongful infringement of hu- 
man liberty, or a wrongful denial of human oppor- 
tunity. 

The reason why men and nations fight for these 
things which some still think comparatively trivial, 
but which so powerfully affect human life and human 
aspiration, is that they are measured by a scale of 
values all their own, and with which no mere material 
event can possibly compare. 

We have heard much of efficiency, of training for 
some specific place or function in human society; but 
the whole world now understands that efficiency is 
without moral quality, and may become a mere instru- 
ment to most immoral and destructive ends. Effi- 
ciency may temporarily exalt a nation, but it cannot 
save it from that destruction which efficiency, when 
apart from high human purpose and lofty ideals, cer- 
tainly carries in its hand. 

This is one of the great lessons of the war. It is a 
lesson which should be quickly applied to correct some 
of the rather shabby and superficial doctrines that are 
all round about us as to the purpose and methods of 



364 NEW VALUES 

education. These may be based upon efficiency, they 
may include and attain efficiency, and yet be quite 
below that plane of excellence upon which modern 
man wishes and intends to move. 

The higher levels of activity and devotion are the 
ones which the war has revealed to us as making the 
strongest appeal to civilized man. It is at these levels 
we shall wish to walk; and it is at these levels that we 
shall wish our nation, and those splendid peoples at 
whose side she stands, to reconstruct the world for a 
new era of progress, of happiness, and of established 
international peace. 

The call of the coming future is powerful beyond all 
compare. The joy of living, when there is so much 
to do, should spur on in unexampled fashion those who 
are to become leaders of the next generation, for these 
are to be charged with almost incredible responsibility 
for guiding the world in search of its new accomplish- 
ments and its new purposes. All knowledge, all train- 
ing, all capacity are now being consecrated to this 
great aim. 

It is the profound conviction of the university you 
this day leave, but to whose membership you will 
always belong, that you understand these new values 
and that they will guide your lives. 



XLII 
DISCIPLINE 



Address on Commencement Day, June 4, 1919 



DISCIPLINE 

For a long time to come the world will be staggering 
under the blows inflicted by the war upon its political, 
its economic, and its social systems. For a still longer 
time the world will be learning the lessons of the war's 
experience and interpreting anew, in the light of that 
experience, not only its aims and ideals but its methods 
of life and work. 

The two million Americans, drawn from every walk 
of life, who went to France to offer their lives if need 
be in the high cause of international justice and polit- 
ical liberty are coming back with new and broader 
outlook, with deeper convictions, and with a sterner 
sense of the realities of life. In less degree, perhaps, 
these same lessons have been learned by those soldiers 
and sailors who remained at home, and by the tens 
of millions of men and women who followed with 
anxious solicitude the events of each succeeding day 
in the war's history. 

Unless all signs fail, the war has taught a new respect 
for discipline and has re-established in the minds of 
men some ancient convictions that had lately shown 
signs of weakening. It was, for example, the excep- 
tionally effective and minutely organized discipline of 
the German people, political, economic, and social, as 
well as military, that made the war an actual fact. It 

367 



368 DISCIPLINE 

was the lack of an equally effective and well-ordered 
discipline on the part of the people of the allied nations 
that permitted the issue to hang so long in the balance. 
Amazing courage, limitless sacrifice, and unbreakable 
wills sustained the shock of battle against overwhelm- 
ing odds until that full organization of national power 
and competence which discipline aims to effect had 
been brought into existence. When that happened, the 
war was speedily won, for the self-imposed discipline of 
the free peoples was certain to be immensely superior 
to the arbitrarily imposed discipline, even though 
cheerfully assented to, of the Germans. 

In similar fashion, thousands and tens of thousands 
of individuals whose lives had been running at loose 
ends and who had never had the occasion or the invita- 
tion to summon all their resources for the accomplish- 
ment of some high and definite purpose found, some- 
times to their surprise, that there was a specific and 
helpful place for them in the closely organized military 
or economic life of the nation. To hold this place one 
condition was absolutely necessary; namely, that they 
accept discipline and obey orders. In a twinkling of 
an eye these men, young and old, found themselves 
working cheerfully and unselfishly as parts of a great 
effective engine of national expression. Much in the 
way of achievement that had seemed beyond their 
reach was now of every -day occurrence. Life was 
filled with new satisfactions because there was a stead- 
ily deepening consciousness of work that was worth 
while being worthily done. The unrest and the dis- 



DISCIPLINE 369 

satisfaction which so many of these brave youths feel 
to-day is due in no small measure to the fact that 
after this striking experience, with its revelation of 
their own value to the world, they are sent back on 
briefest warning to a life in which their part and place 
are by no means so definite or so clearly defined, and 
in which they see disorganization and wastefulness 
seeming to usurp the place of discipline and that 
precise adaptation of means to ends with which they 
had become familiar. 

These contrasts afford material for grave reflection. 
Through long centuries of observation and experience 
mankind had learned very much about the meaning 
and the methods of discipline, but in the decade or 
two immediately preceding the war there had been a 
steadily growing tendency to overlook all this and to 
assert either that general discipline was impossible or 
that it was unimportant. The war has rudely over- 
turned a good many tables of irrelevant statistics and 
has made it unnecessary longer to pay attention to 
elaborate records of unmeaning experiments. The 
hard sense of men again asserts itself and points clearly 
to discipline as a necessary element in individual, in 
social, and in national progress. All depends on the 
use which is made of discipline and on the purposes 
which a disciplined individual, a disciplined society, 
or a disciplined nation aims to accomplish. 

The beginnings of discipline are found in man's 
contact with the forces of nature. He soon learns 
that he is limited by the instruments and the material 



370 DISCIPLINE 

which nature provides, by the processes which we call 
nature's laws, and by his own general relation to an 
environment which, however much it may submit 
itself to inquiry and to modified control, stubbornly 
resists being done away with entirely. 

The second step in the development of discipline is 
the experience of the race and the teachings of our 
elders. These save us from the necessity of having 
to make over again the costly and painful mistakes of 
those who have gone before us. They tell us in un- 
mistakable terms that certain courses of action and 
certain habits are advantageous and are to be followed 
and built up, while certain other courses of action and 
certain other habits are disadvantageous and are to 
be let alone. A very large part of formal education 
consists in learning these lessons of human experience 
and in coming gradually to understand the reasons for 
them. 

The third and final step in discipline is when the 
individual of maturing powers takes immediate con- 
trol of his own life, and by his own will and because of 
his own understanding imposes upon himself the limita- 
tions and restrictions which human experience teaches 
to be necessary or expedient. The aim of all discipline, 
therefore, is self-discipline. We study the limitations 
which nature imposes upon man and we learn the 
lessons which past experience teaches, in order that 
man may govern himself in the light of these, and 
constantly advance through a progress that is con- 
structive because it is built upon the sure foundation 



DISCIPLINE 371 

of a knowledge of nature and a knowledge of human 
happenings. 

The notion that men may drift through life without 
discipline or without purposed shaping of their con- 
duct and yet be worthy of human opportunity and 
human aspiration is not very complimentary to man- 
kind, or even to the lower animals. The instincts of 
the latter provide them with the protection against 
disaster which discipline and self-discipline offer to 
man. Drifting through life, whether it be a life of 
comparative ease or a life of comparative hardship, is 
not a worthy use of personality. The period of study 
and formal preparation is the period when youth are 
absorbing from nature and from human experience the 
raw material with which to construct their own life- 
aims and their own course of ordered conduct. If 
school and college and university training and teaching 
do not supply these, they have sadly failed. Infor- 
mation is no substitute for discipline, nor will mere 
skill or competence take its place. Information is 
useful if it be the material for reflection, but other- 
wise it has only the value of an index to an encyclo- 
paedia. Skill and competence are useful if they are 
organized for the accomplishment of a fine and clearly 
understood purpose. Otherwise they easily become 
the instruments of vice and crime. It is man's pur- 
pose which is the key to his character, and it is man's 
self-discipline for the accomplishment of his purpose 
which is the explanation of his success or failure hi 
life. And by success is not meant getting rich. The 



372 DISCIPLINE 

mere heaping up of great wealth, which a generation 
ago was thought to be a laudable occupation, is now 
felt to be a rather stupid use of time and opportunity. 
If wealth be gained and then used for human advance- 
ment, that is one thing; but if it be heaped up and 
merely left like a ball and chain around the feet of 
the next generation, that is quite another matter. 

A self-disciplined nation made up of self-disciplined 
men and women, training its youth through discipline 
to self-discipline, is a nation that is building on a sure 
foundation not only for prosperity but for that happi- 
ness, that usefulness, and that satisfaction which give 
to prosperity its real significance. To aid in that 
accomplishment has been the aim and the purpose of 
Columbia University through a hundred and sixty-five 
years. May your memories of the days spent in 
Columbia's halls be ever bright and welcome, and may 
both success and satisfaction accompany you as you 
do your part in the work of the world. 



XLIII 

CAPTAINS OF A GREAT EFFORT 



Address on Commencement Day, June 2, 1920 



CAPTAINS OF A GREAT EFFORT 

A world in ferment has passed into a world per- 
plexed. Not since the invention of printing and the 
rise of the common school, with the consequent spread 
of knowledge among the people, have so huge and so 
little understood forces been at work in the world as 
is the case at this moment. We are standing, in a 
state of unstable equilibrium, at the summit of a vast 
upheaval out of the political, the social, and the 
economic life of the modern nations. This upheaval 
has long been under way. The discovery and the 
settlement of America were both a symptom and a 
cause. The struggle between parliament and the king 
and the overthrow of the Stuarts were both a symptom 
and a cause. The development of modern science, the 
philosophic and economic doctrines whose beginnings 
are associated with the eighteenth century, and the 
French Revolution itself, were both a symptom and a 
cause. The progress of invention, the development 
and the applications of steam and of electricity, the 
industrial revolution, the gathering of increasing units 
of population in large cities, the weakening and the 
decline of faith, first in the unseen and eternal and 
next in the power of fundamental principles of life and 
of morals, were both a symptom and a cause. If the 
Great War had not sprung from the lust of Teutonic 
Imperialism in 1914, it now seems, as we look back, 

375 



376 CAPTAINS OF A GREAT EFFORT 

not unlikely that it would have sprung from some 
other cause a few years later. The beast in man lies 
very near the surface and the worst side of human 
nature is constantly ready to challenge its best side 
to mortal combat. 

In all these facts and happenings are to be found 
the ground for the world's perplexity. Its old stand- 
ards of weight and measurement in matters political, 
in matters social, and in matters economic will no 
longer serve. To change the figure, the new wine of 
experience and of aspiration cannot be poured into 
the old bottles of tradition and convention. In con- 
sequence, the world is perplexed. It cannot — it feels 
that it must not — throw away the great achievement 
and rich experience of the past, and it has not yet 
learned how to apply these to the new conditions. 
Human nature is once again being subjected to a 
searching test of capacity before the stern tribunal of 
history. Those who have faith in mankind are serenely 
confident that, despite the troubled outlook, all will 
yet be well. Those who have lost faith in mankind see 
"not light, but rather darkness visible," and civiliza- 
tion on its way to final ruin. 

If indeed these be times that try men's souls, then 
they are good times in which to live. None but the 
weakling or the poltroon will turn his back upon the 
tremendous struggle to put civilization upon a new 
and yet stouter foundation. The call to men and 
women of capacity, of courage, and of character is 
clarionlike in its clearness. It is not a call to revolu- 



CAPTAINS OF A GREAT EFFORT 377 

tion; it is a call to hasten evolution. It is a call to 
summon all the resources of a nation — the resources 
physical and material, the resources intellectual and 
moral, the resources economic and political — for a 
successful effort at reconstruction and advance, not 
for ourselves alone but for the whole world of civiliza- 
tion. The old and tested principles are still sound and 
true if they be stripped of the seaweed that has grown 
upon them during their long voyage across the seas of 
human experience. The old characteristics of clear 
conviction, straight thinking, human sympathy, fine 
feeling, rugged determination are the characteristics of 
the conquerors and the builders of to-morrow. Do 
not wait for others to move. Come up out of the 
valley of despair, of hopelessness, and of impending 
disaster, and help make the world better and stronger 
yourself. 

Our nation has passed through the shadow of a 
great danger and has surmounted that danger by a 
great effort which history will never fail to recall with 
gratitude. The danger was lest physical isolation and 
a sense of separation from the world's troubles might 
lead to indifference, to selfish materialism, and to that 
sure decay which follows upon self-satisfied and effort- 
less national contentment. Providence ruled other- 
wise. The heart of the American people was moved, 
its soul was stirred, and its conscience was quickened 
to lively action, by a rapid succession of events which 
heralded the quick coming of the day of doom unless 
the cause of human liberty was saved from the brutal 



378 CAPTAINS OF A GREAT EFFORT 

rule of organized force. The American people rose, 
men and women alike, by the million. Each state, 
each community, each household, contributed its effort, 
and the solemn spectacle of one hundred and ten mil- 
lions of free men and free women, moving almost as 
one toward the accomplishment of a high and noble 
purpose, was offered to the world. That effort, so 
characteristic of an intelligent, high-minded, and lib- 
erty-loving people, had its captains. There were 
captains of those who bore arms and who went, life in 
hand, singing the songs of home and of country, to 
the front line of battle. There were captains of those 
who go down to the sea in ships, ceaselessly to keep 
watch amid darkness and storm and wave, lest harm 
happen to men and to those things which minister to 
the life of men. There were captains of those who 
bring succor and relief to the stricken, to the wounded, 
to the starving, whose ministry of mercy is so beautiful 
an accompaniment of that last form of high effort 
which calls for the sacrifice of human happiness and 
of human life. There were captains of those who 
minister to the minds and souls of armies and of 
navies, that, as the battle raged and as the angel of 
death hovered over them seeking and choosing whom 
to strike, their thoughts might be turned to "whatso- 
ever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely, 
whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are 
pure, whatsoever things are of good report." All 
honor to these many captains of the nation's many- 
sided effort; all highest honor to those captains of 



CAPTAINS OF A GREAT EFFORT 379 

captains whose knowledge, whose skill, whose insight, 
whose foresight, and whose devotion brought victory 
in all its forms to the cause upon whose success the 
heart of the American people was so surely set. 

Men and women of Columbia, those of you who 
to-day go out by the thousand to take hold of the 
task of life, go out from these historic doors at a great 
moment. You go out when the university has sum- 
moned to its pFesence the captains of the captains in 
the nation's great effort, that it may invite them to a 
high place in its notable membership and say before 
all the world, with sincerity, with full appreciation, 
and with grateful joy, that they have deserved well of 
their country; that they have added to its repute and 
renown, and that this ancient university wishes for- 
ever to associate its name with theirs and their names 
with Columbia. 



XLIV 
FAITH IN THE FUTURE 



Address on Commencement Day, June I, 1921 



FAITH IN THE FUTURE 

The active and ingenious mind of Professor Bergson 
has lately reaffirmed his belief that the future is not 
pre-existent in the present, and that events are not 
possible until they have happened. One may resist 
the temptation to embark on the sea of speculation to 
which this statement invites, and yet be stimulated by 
it to examine one's attitude toward the future and the 
effect of this attitude upon the conduct of his daily 
life. It is a mathematical truism that the present is 
wholly a creature of human imagination. Time is in 
persistent flow, and as the sound of the word present 
dies upon our ears that moment to which it refers is 
already past and another is fleetly following it. The 
future does not lie some distance ahead of us, only to 
be reached by long travail and over many obstacles. 
It strikes us in the face instantly as we open our eyes 
to view the world in which we live. The true fact is 
that faith in the future is the foundation, and pretty 
much the sole foundation, for all that we do and pre- 
pare to do. Education, for example, is toward a more 
or less definite end, and that end is always ahead of 
us. Work is undertaken for some set purpose, and 
that purpose is always ahead of us. Accumulation is 
sought for some hoped-for use, and that use is always 
ahead of us. Faith in the future is the only justifica- 
tion for human activity of any sort whatsoever. 



384 FAITH IN THE FUTURE 

The human race has had its full share of pessimists, 
philosophic and other, but only occasionally have these 
pessimists had the courage of their professed convic- 
tions and sought to avoid facing the future by their 
own tragic act. The majority of men are, to be sure, 
unreflecting, unconcerned with the future, and in- 
different to it save as they instinctively take it for 
granted. Others, and among these should be all those 
who have caught the spirit of a true university, have 
faith in the future, and by that faith are led so to 
shape their acts and thoughts that the future as it 
comes shall be better than the present as it goes. This 
faith in the future is justified and in high degree help- 
ful in the guidance of life if it rest on reasonableness 
and on a full understanding of the fact that what has 
been merges into what is and makes way for it. 

It pleases some ardent and hopelessly youthful 
spirits to portray themselves as in revolt against 
things as they are; but this is not the constructive 
temper or the spirit in which to go about the serious 
business of making the world better. An apprecia- 
tion of the present and an understanding of the past 
are a far better preparation for the improvement of 
the future than a dissatisfaction with the present and 
a contempt for the past can possibly be. Faith in 
the future includes faith in that upon which the future 
rests and out of which it must grow. Professor 
Bergson may be right in his view that the future is 
not preformed in the present, but surely he would 
not wish us to believe that the future stands in no 



FAITH IN THE FUTURE 385 

relation to the present and is not in fact, if not in 
form, a product of forces, whether hidden or other, 
that are now at work in the hearts and minds of men. 

Contentment is as lofty and fine a state of mind as 
smug satisfaction is unbecoming and unworthy. Faith 
in the future will make use of contentment, but it can 
do nothing with smug satisfaction. The man whose 
mind is closed to all proposals for change, for reason- 
able experiment with the unfamiliar and untested, is 
stubbornly without faith in the future. His mind and 
spirit move in a closed circle and are the captives of 
their present environment. The free spirit will use 
its environment as a stepping-stone to new enterprises, 
to new experiments, and to new undertakings. It will 
not be wasteful or extravagant of efFort, because it 
will remember what past experience and past experi- 
ment have taught, and what enterprises and under- 
takings have been definitely set aside as unwise, un- 
becoming, or unworthy. As man goes forward in 
civilization, progresses, as we call it, his field of choice 
is steadily limited as possible courses of thought and 
action are shown to be stupid, or harmful, or wicked. 
Slowly through the centuries there emerge those 
choices from which selection must be made, and these 
become ideals by which to guide and to shape the 
conduct of men and of societies. Faith in the future 
means faith in those ideals which survive the test of 
rational experience and severe experiment. 

It is said of Pythagoras that when asked what time 
was, he answered that "It is the soul of the world." 



386 FAITH IN THE FUTURE 

If time be the soul of the world, then the future is 
the material out of which the world's living body is 
to be built and by means of which its work is to be 
done. If to our limited human imagination the future 
is the yawning void which Marcus Aurelius thought it 
to be, then it is our task to fill that void full to the 
brim with worthy accomplishment. As this accom- 
plishment grows in importance and in high quality 
from century to century and from age to age, it will 
join with those ideals which persist because of their 
nobility and their worth, to justify the deepest faith 
of man in 

"One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event 
To which the whole, creation moves." 



INDEX 



INDEX 



A. B. degree. See Bachelor of arts 

Absence, leave of, 113 

Academic aloofness, 12; freedom, 
12, 63-65, 88, 115-116, 138, 157- 
160; career, 113-116; limitations, 
115-116 

Adams, Henry, 30 

Administration and government, 
163-176 

Admission requirements to King's 
College, 28-29; examinations, 101, 
106, 108, no 

Adrain, Robert, 38 

iEneas, 66 

yEschylus, 189, 319 

Age of Pericles, 311; of irrational- 
ism, 3 1 1-3 16; of the crowd, 313- 
314; of the demagogue, 313-314 

Albany, State educational building, 

55 

Alfred, the Great, 315 

Algebra, 99 

Allies, European war, 220-221 

AlthofF, Friedrich, 83 

American college. See College, 
American 

American university, scheme for, 40; 
president, 82-84; ideals of con- 
quest, 245 

Americans, moral principle, 204 

Anderson, Henry James, 38, 42 

Anderson, Martin B., 81 

Andover creed, 179 

Anthon, Charles, 39 

Apostles' creed, 179 

Aquinas, Thomas. See Thomas 
Aquinas 

Archaeology, 39, 43 

Ariadne, 355 

Aristophanes, 189 



Aristotle, 9, 189, 273 

Arithmetic, 99 

Arnold, Matthew, 8, 267, 271 

Arts, Bachelor of. See Bachelor of 

arts 
Arts, Faculty of, 40 
Associations of civilized men, 197 
Auchmuty family, 30 
Augustine, St., 7, 75, 189 
Austria-Hungary, dismemberment, 

246 
Autocracy, 229, 246 

Bachelor of arts degree, 98-100, 103, 
106, 108; course in reading, 189 

Bacon, 10, 19, 30, 189 

Baden, at the peace table, 239 

Balliol, Sir John de, 14-15 

Balliol College. See Oxford Uni- 
versity 

Barclay family, 30 

Bard, Samuel, 32 

Barnard, Frederick A. P., 31, 33, 36, 
42-43, 81-82 

Barnard College, 253 

Barrett, Justice, 168-170 

Battle of Concord, 40; of Lexington, 
40; of Sedan, 238 

Bavaria, at the peace table, 239 

Bayard, Robert, 30 

Beekman family, 30 

Belgium, restitution, 240 

Benson, Arthur Christopher, 128 

Bergson, Henri, 383-384 

Berkeley, George, bishop, 28, 30 

Berlin University, 50, 61, 114 

Betts, William, 36, 42 

Bible, allusions and quotations, 21, 
28, 45, 163-164, 195, 199-200, 
226, 248-249, 294, 299, 312, 335, 



389 



39° 



INDEX 



376, 378; in Greek (admission re- 
quirements), 28 

Bismarck, 238 

Bloomer, Joshua, 30 

Bogert, Cornelius, 30 

Bologna University, 61, 92-93 

Bolsheviki, literary and academic, 

173 

Boswell, James, 316 

Botany, 35, 38 

Bourbon, house of, 340 

Bowdoin College, Longfellow's ad- 
dress on language teaching, 144 

Bracton, Henry de, 38 

British Museum, endowment raised 
by lottery, 23 

Brodrick, George Charles, 2 1 

Browne, Sir Thomas, 293 

Bruno, Giordano, 4 

Buffon, 20 

Building of character, 203-205 

Burke, Edmund, 20, 256 

Csesar, 99 

Cambridge University, 21, 31, 61 

Canadian universities, 61 

Captains of a great effort, 375-379 

Carlyle, Thomas, 260-261 

Cathedrals, 72-73 

Cervantes, 189 

Chair of divinity, 27 

Chanson de Roland, 189 

Character, building of, 203-205 

Charity, intellectual, 303-307 

Charlemagne, 4 

Charter, of King's College, 40; of 
Columbia University, 165 

Chemistry, 38, 99 

Children, individuality of, 184; ele- 
mentary training, 186 

China, imitation of the European 
and American university, 66 

Christian church, 65; education, 197 

Christmas greeting to Columbia's 
participants in the European war, 
224-226; 229-230 

Church and state, 4-5, 10- 11, 197- 



199; Christian church, 65; an 
educational agency, 197 

Church of England, and King's Col- 
lege, 24-25 

Cicero, 10, 28, 99 

City and the university, 14, 27, 44- 

45. ; 49751, 138-140 

Civilization, progress of, 72 

Classics, admission requirements to 
King's College, 28; to the early 
American college, 99; study of, in 
King's College, 39; failure in 
teaching, 188; present-day college, 
188-189; Bachelor of arts read- 
ing list, 189 

Clear thinking, 253-256 

Clinton, De Witt, 33, 37 

Clinton, George, 56 

Closed mind, defined, 339-340 

Clossy, Samuel, 31-32 

Clubs, formation of, 159-160 

Coke, Sir Edward, 38 

College, and the city, 14, 27, 44-45, 
49-51, 138-140; defined, 62; the 
American college, 97-110; sta- 
tistics of early distribution, 98; 
degrees, 98; curriculum, 99; the 
small college, 100; entrance exam- 
inations and change in length of 
course, 101-110. See also Uni- 
versity 

College of New Jersey. See Prince- 
ton University 

College of Philadelphia. See Penn- 
sylvania University. 

College of Physicians and Surgeons, 
42 

Columbia University, change of site, 
36, 44; charter, 40, 165; Univer- 
sity council, 164; both American 
and Christian, 199-200. See also 
King's College 

Columbia University and the Eu- 
ropean war, 223-224; greeting to 
its members who are taking part 
in the war, 224-226; Columbia and 
the war (address), 233-241; en- 



INDEX 



39i 



thusiasm of the teaching staff, 
234-235; Students' army train- 
ing corps, 245; reconstruction, 
246-249; statistics of those who 
have taken part, 361. See also 
European war 

Companionship, worthy, 209-212; 
contact with the first-rate, 291- 
294 

Comte, Auguste, 91 

Concord, Battle of, 40 

Conquests of war and of peace, 245- 
249 

Constitutional revision, 37 

Contact with the first-rate, 291- 
294; worthy companionship, 209- 
212 

Contacts of civilized men, 197 

Contemporary civilization, course 
in, 188-189 

Contract, inviolability of, 280 

Cooper, Myles, 31 

Copernican theory, 19, 193 

Cornbury, Edward Hyde, lord, 25 

Cottonian Library, 23 

Course of study. See Curriculum 

Crowd, age of the, 313-314 

Cruger, Henry, 30 

Cultusministerium of Prussia, 82-83 

Current topics, teaching of, 90 

Curriculum, of King's College, 28- 
30; of the early American college, 
99; course on Introduction to con- 
temporary civilization, 188-189; 
special course in reading, 189; 
four-years course, 101-109, 253- 

255 
Cutting, Leonard, 31 
Cutting family, 30 
Cynicism, 259-260 
Czecho-Slovakia, and the League of 

nations, 239-240 

Dante, 189, 320 

Darwin, Charles, 4, 19, 189 

Davies, Charles, 38 

Degrees, of presidents of Columbia 



University, 32; Bachelor of arts, 
98-100, 103, 106, 108 

De Lancey, James, 24-25, 30 

Demagogue, age of the, 313-314 

Democracy, in administration, 165; 
in educational effort, 196 

Denmark, and the League of na- 
tions, 239 

De Peyster family, 30 

Discipline, address on, 367-372 

Discovery, spirit of, 62 

Divinity, chair of, 27; first instruc- 
tion in, 40 

Duane, James, 41 

Dublin University, Trinity College, 

31 

Du Bois-Reymond, Emil, 120 
Duer, William Alexander, 31 

Economics, 38, 99 

Edinburgh University, 61, 260 

Education, system in New York 
State, 56-57; failures in method, 
187-188; defined, 196; Christian, 
197 

Educational advance, act of legis- 
lature, 23; early movements in 
King's ( College, 32-33; King's 
College a leader in the work of the 
Public School Society of New 
York, 33; President Johnson's 
first advertisement in 1754, 39; 
expansion urged in faculties, 40; 
scheme for an American univer- 
sity, 40; Report of 1784, 41; Re- 
port of 1830, 41; type of members 
of faculties, 51; first conceptions, 
56 

Edwards, Jonathan, 22, 28 

Efficiency, 363-364 

Egotism, 89, 120, I94-I95> 305, 341 

Elementary school, and personality, 
59; restored to its proper busi- 
ness, 186 

Eliot, Charles W., 82 

Elizabethtown, college at. See 
Princeton University 



392 



INDEX 



Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 10, 204, 
210-21 1, 221, 266-267 

English publicists, 20; universities, 
40; course in English literature, 
99; ideals of conquest, 245 

Entrance examinations, 101, 106, 
108, no 

Erasmus Hall, 32 

Erie Canal, 37 

Erzberger, Matthias, 236 

Ethics, practical, 203-205 

Eton College, 31 

Euripides, 189 

European war, addresses on : 
Steadfast in the faith, 219-226; 
New call to service, 229-230; 
Columbia and the war, 233-241; 
Conquests of war and peace, 
245-249; World in ferment, 355- 
358; New values, 361-364; Disci- 
pline, 367-372; Captains of a great 
effort, 375-379 

European war, our allies, 220-221; 
German propaganda, 222-224; 
greeting to Columbia's partici- 
pants in, 224-226, 229-230; de- 
scription of militarism, 235-237; 
reconstruction, 246-249 

Evolution, doctrine of, 312-313 

Examinations, admission, 101, 106, 
108, no 

Faculties of arts, medicine, law, and 

divinity, 40 
Faculty, philosophical, 62-63, IQ 6 
Faith in the future, address on, 383- 

386 
Family, an educational agency, 197 
First instruction in divinity, 40 
First instruction in law, 40 
First instruction in medicine, 40 
First-rate, contact with the, 291- 

294; worthy companionship, 209- 

212 
Fish, Hamilton, 36, 42 
Fisher, Herbert, 83 



Fiske, John, 193 

Foch, Ferdinand, 233, 236 

Force and reasonableness, 215-216 

Foreign-language study, 143-146 

Four-years course, 101-109, 253-255 

France, restitution, 240; ideals of 

conquest, 245 
Franklin, Benjamin, 22, 28 
Freedom of speech, 159-160 
French church, and King's College, 

27; University, 40; Revolution, 

375 
Fulton, Robert, 37 
Future, faith in the, 383-386 

Gauss, Karl Friedrich, 38 

Geometry, 99 

German universities, 82-83; lecture 
system, 128; propaganda, Euro- 
pean war, 222-224 

Germany, militarism, 235-237; gov- 
ernment, 237-238; at the peace 
table, 239; and the League of na- 
tions, 240; discipline, 367-368; 
imperialism, 375 

Gibbon, Edward, 21, 151 

Gilman, Daniel C, 82, 86 

Gladstone, William Ewart, 211, 292 

Glasgow University, 31 

God, conception of, 195 

Goethe, 189, 273 

Gorgias, 88 

Gospel of hope, 259-261 

Gottingen University, 20-21 

Government and administration, 
163-176 

Grafton, Duke of, 321 

Gray, Thomas, 21 

Great Britain. See under English 

Greek. See Classics 

Greeley, Horace, 1 80-1 81 

Greetings to Columbia's participants 
in the European war, 224-226 

Griswold, Joseph, 30 

Hallam, 256 

Halle University, 21 



INDEX 



393 



Hamilton, Alexander, 20, 37, 41, 

55-56 
Harleian manuscripts, 23 
Harper, William R., 82 
Harpur, Robert, 31 
Harris, William, 31 
Harrow School, 32 
Harvard, John, 14-15 
Harvard University, 22, 31-32, 82 
Hegel, 189 
Heraclitus, 76 
Herodotus, 189 
Herschel, 38 
Hewitt, Abram S., 37 
Hildebrand, 4 
Hilty, Carl, 260 
History, philosophy of, 39; study of, 

43, 99, 331, 34 I_ 342J failures in 

method, 89, 187 
Hobart, John Henry, bishop, 41 
Hoffmann, Anthony, 30 
Holland, and the League of nations, 

239 
Homer, 99, 189 
Hone, Philip, 36 

Honesty, intellectual and moral, 261 
Hope, gospel of, 259-261 
Horace, 14, 189, 297, 326 
Hosack, David, 35, 38 
Hosack botanic garden, 35 
Household of Socrates, 62 
Hugo, Victor, 189 
Human personality in education, 

59-60-61 
Hume, David, 189 
Hungary, dismemberment, 246 
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 120 

Idols, 195 

Imperialism, Teutonic, 375 

Indifference, 259-260 

Individual and the mass, 271-272 

Individuality of children, 184; 
human, 334-335 

Ingalls, John J., 347 

Instructors. See Professors; Teach- 
ers 



Integrity, moral and intellectual, 
297-300 

Intellectual upheaval, 193; stand- 
ards for measurement, 291-294; 
integrity, 297-300; charity, 303- 

307 
Introduction to contemporary civilU 

zation, course in, 188-189 
Inviolability of contract, 280 
Irish universities, 40 
Irnerius, 61 

Irrationalism, age of, 31 1-3 16 
Irving, John T., 41 

James, Henry, 183 

Jay, John, 30 

Jay, Peter A., 33 

Jefferson, Thomas, 20 

Johnson, Samuel, 21, 316 

Johnson, Samuel, first president of 
King's College, 19-20, 28-30; 
graduate of Yale, 31; standing in 
scholarship, 37; first advertise- 
ment of King's College in 1754, 39 

Johnson, William Samuel, 31-33, 

36-37, 41 

Joubert, 215 

Jugo-Slavia, and the League of na- 
tions, 239-240 

Junius, 321 

Kant, Immanuel, 20, 75, 189 

Kent, James, 38 

Kindergarten, and personality, 59 

King, Charles, 31, 41-42 

King, Rufus, 36 

Kingdom of light, 347~35i 

King's College, Samuel Johnson, 
first president, 19-20; contem- 
porary history, 20; endowment 
raised by lottery, 23; president 
must be a member of the Church 
of England, 24; charter, 25, 40; 
liberality in religious matters, 26- 
29; admission requirements, 28- 
29; curriculum, 28-30; an in- 
novator and leader, 3 1 ; type of its 



394 



INDEX 



instructors, 31; its presidents, 31- 
32; educational advance, 32-33; 
financial difficulties, 33-36; change 
of site, 36, 44; achievements of in- 
structors, 37-39; plans for ad- 
vance, 39-41; memorial of 18 10, 
41; plans of 1858, 42. See also 
Columbia University 
King's Farm, 25, 34-35, 44 
Kingsland, grant to King's College, 
34 

Laboratory instruction, 127-128, 
130, 136 

Lamarck, 20 

Land grants to King's College, 34-35 

Language study, President Bar- 
nard's outlook, 43; in the early 
American college, 99; address on, 
143-146; failure in method, 187 

Laplace, Pierre Simon, marquis de, 
20, 38 

Latin. See Classics 

Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent, 20, 38 

Law, teaching and public service 
in King's College, 38; first instruc- 
tion in King's College, 40; Law 
school organized, 42; Bologna 
University, 61 ; Roman, 65; and 
sociology, 91; law case, People 
ex rel. Kelsey v. New York Medical 
School, 168-170; lynch-law, 285- 
287 

Leadership in reconstruction work, 
246-249 

League of nations, 239-241 

Leave of absence, 113 

Lecture as a method of instruction, 
at Kings' College, 42; danger of 
being overlectured, 92-93; value 
and faults of, 128-129, 134-135 

Leibnitz, 170 

Lessing, 189 

Lewis, Morgan, 41 

Lewis and Clark expedition, 38 

Lexington, Battle of, 40 

Liard, Louis, 83 



Liberal men and women, 179-189; 
open-mindedness, 286, 304, 339— 

343 
Liberty, 63-65, 198-200, 280, 331- 

335 
Lieber, Francis, 39 
Light, kingdom of, 347-351 
Lincoln, Abraham, 277-281 
Linnaeus, Carl von, 20 
Lispenard family, 30 
Littleton, Sir Thomas, 38 
Livingston, John H., 41 
Livingston, Robert R., 37 
Livingston, William, 24 
Livingston family, 30 
Locke, John, 10, 30, 255-256 
Logic, 99 
Logical presentation of facts, 136- 

137 

London Spectator, 163 

Longfellow, Henry Wads worth, 144 

Lottery, money raised for educa- 
tional advance, 23, 26, 33-34 

Louisiana purchase, 38 

Louvain University, 236 

Low, Seth, 32 

Lowell, James Russell, 63 

Lower Estate, 35-36 

Lucretius, 189 

Lusitania (ship), 240 

Lutheran church and King's Col- 
lege, 27 

Lyell, Sir Charles, 189 

Lynch-law, in judgment, 285-287 

Macaulay, 189 

McVickar, John, 38 

Magazines, 151-152, 181 

Magdalen College. See Oxford Uni- 
versity 

Making liberal men and women, 
179-189 

Marcus Aurelius, 4, 189, 386 

Marston, Thomas, 30 

Mason, John Mitchell, 41 

Mass and the individual, 271-272 

Mathematics, King's College, 31, 



INDEX 



395 



38-39; curriculum, 99; supervision 
of teachers, 133-134; failure in 
teaching, 188 

Mechanics, 99 

Medicine, King's College, 37-38, 43; 
first instruction in, 40; College of 
Physicians and Surgeons, 42 

Memorial of 18 10, on King's College, 

41 

Memory and faith, 71-78 

Mental activity, period of, 293-294 

Merton, Walter de, 14-15 

Merton College. See Oxford Uni- 
versity 

Metaphysics, 99 

Michael Angelo, 3 20 

Miers, Sir Henry, 83 

Militarism, 235-237 

Mill, John Stuart, 333 

Milton, John, 189 

Mines, School of, 42 

Mitchill, Samuel Latham, 32-33, 38 

Moliere, 189 

Montaigne, 189 

Montesquieu, 189 

Moore, Benjamin, 31 

Moore, Clement C, 4 1 

Moore, Nathaniel Fish, 31 

Moral philosophy, 99; principle, lack 
of, in some Americans, 204 

Morley, John, 211, 286-287 

Morris, Gouverneur, 37 

Morris family, 30 

Munich University, 50 

Napoleon, 40 

Natural history, 38 

New call to service, 229-230 

New paganism, 193-200 

New values, address on, 361-364 

New York (City), an influence in 
scientific work, 30-31; Public 
School Society, 33; Columbia 
University and the city, 49-51; a 
laboratory for Columbia Uni- 
versity, 138-140; German prop- 
aganda in, 223 



New York (State), Educational 
building at Albany, 55; educa- 
tional system, 56-57; Superin- 
tendent of public instruction, 56- 

57 
New York Medical School v. People 

ex rel. Kelsey, 168-170 
New York University, 50 
Newman, John Henry, 50 
Newspapers, 151- 15 2, 181; trial by, 

325 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 19-20, 30 
Nibelungenlied, 189 
Nicholl family, 30 
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 189 
Norway, and the League of nations, 

239 

Ogden, David B., 36 
Onderdonk, Benjamin Tredwell, 

bishop, 41 
Open-mindedness, 179-189, 286, 304, 

339-343 
Orient, stagnation of, 334 
Osborn, governor of New York, 24 
Oxford University, 15, 21, 31, 61, 

114; vocational training at, 149- 

ISO 

Paganism, new, 193-200 

Paris commune, 238 

Paris, German propaganda, 223 

Paris University, 32, 50, 61, 114 

Parker, Francis W., 134 

Pascal, Blaise, 75 

Pasteur, Louis, 211 

Patriotism, 230 

Paul, St., 195 

Peace, sacrifices of, 229-230; and 

war, conquests of, 245-249 
Pell, Philip, 30 
Pembroke College. See Oxford 

University 
Pennsylvania University, 22, 28 
Pensions, 114 
People ex rel. Kelsey v. New York 

Medical School, 168-170 



396 



INDEX 



Pericles, age of, 311 

Personal responsibility, 265-267 

Personality in education, 59-61 

Pessimism, 259-260 

Petrarch, 189 

Petrograd, German propaganda, 223 

Phantom Lake in Wisconsin, 347 

Philadelphia, College of. See Penn- 
sylvania University 

Philipse family, 30 

Philology, 39 

Philosophical faculty, 62-63, 106 

Physicians and Surgeons, College 
of, 42 

Physics, 43, 99 

Pilate, 199 

Plans of 1858, for the advancement 
of King's College, 42 

Plato, 90, 179, 189 

Plutarch, 189 

Poland, and the League of nations, 
239-240 

Political economy, 38, 99 

Political science, 43 

Port Royal logic, 255 

Power to produce, 183 

Presbyterian church, and King's 
College, 27 

President, efforts in Europe to de- 
velop an office similar to the 
American university president, 
82-84; true functions of, 84-85; 
defined by D. C. Gilman, 86 

Presidents of Columbia University: 
King's College president must be- 
long to the Church of England, 
24; training and degrees, 31-32; 
Samuel Johnson, 19-20, 28-31, 37, 
39; William Johnson, 31-33, 36- 
37, 41; Charles King, 41-42; F. 
A. P. Barnard, 31, 33, 36, 42-43, 
81-82 

Priestley, Joseph, 38 

Princeton University, 22 

Private property, 280 

Production, 183 

Professors, true functions of, 87-92; 



criticism of, 155-160; appoint- 
ment of, 166-167; removal of, 
168-170; accepting other posi- 
tions, 175-176. See also Teachers 

Progress, 183; the elementary school, 
186 

Progressive, the modern, 315 

Prohibition, 159 

Propaganda, enemy, in the Euro- 
pean War, 222-224 

Property, private, 280 

Protestantism, 196 

Provoost, Samuel, 30, 41 

Prussian universities, 82-83; Cul- 
tusministerium, 82-83 ; milita- 
rism, 235-237 

Psychological presentation of facts, 
136-137 

Ptolemaic conception of the uni- 
verse, 19 

Public School Society of New York, 

33 

Publicists, English, 20 
Puritan, 8 
Pythagoras, 385 

Queen's College. See Oxford Uni- 
versity 
Questionnaire, 86 

Railroads, 38 

Reactionary, 182 

Reading, value of, 151-152; failure 
in teaching, 187-188; course in, 
189 

Reasonableness, 215-216 

Reconstruction, after the European 
war, 246-249; social and eco- 
nomic, 277-281 

Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, 
and King's College, 27 

Religion and education, 195-197 

Rembrandt, 320 

Remsen family, 30 

Renaissance, a new, 303 

Report of 1784, on King's College, 
4i 



INDEX 



397 



Report of 1830, on King's College, 

41 

Requirements for admission. See 

Admission 

Research, 119 

Responsibility, personal, 265-267, 
306 

Rhetoric, 99 

Ritzema, Rudolph, 30 

Robespierre, Maximilian, 332 

Robinson, Beverly, 36 

Roland, Madame, 58 

Roland, Song of, 189 

Romaine, Nicholas, 41 

Roman Catholic church, 32; law, 
oldest institution, 65; empire, de- 
cline and fall, 303 

Romanoff dynasty, 237 

Rome, German propaganda, 223 

Romeyn, John B., 30 

Roosevelt family, 30 

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 20, 189 

Ruggles, Samuel B., 36, 42 

Russia, German propaganda, 223; 
government, 238; at the peace 
table, 239; disorder, 246 

Rutgers, Henry, 30, 33 

Sacrifices of peace, 229-230 

Sadler, Michael, 83 

St. Andrews University, 61 

St. Omer College, 32 

Salaries, of teachers, 113, 121 

Salerno, University of, 61 

Salisbury, Lord, 163 

Salmon, George, 271 

Scheme for an American university, 
40 

Schiller, 175, 189 

Scholarship and service, 1-15, 189 

School of Mines, 42 

Schuyler, Arent, 30 

Science in curriculum of King's Col- 
lege, 29-30, 32, 43; School of 
Mines, 42; laboratory instruction, 
127-128; failure in teaching, 187; 
life of Pasteur, 211 



Sciolism, 7 

Scrap of paper, 362 

Screw propeller, 38 

Secondary school, 101-102, 105, no 

Sedan, battle of, 238 

Self-discipline, 369-372 

Seneca, 254, 322 

Serbia, restitution, 240 

Service, new call to, 229-230 

Service of the university, 53-67 

Shakespeare, William, 189, 320, 350 

Shaw, George Bernard, 90 

Shelley, Mrs., 271, 274 

Site, of Columbia University, 36, 44 

Slavs, 237 

Sloane collection, British Museum, 

23 
Smith, Adam, 189 
Smith, Goldwin, 185 
Social reconstruction, 277-281 
Socialism, 159 
Sociology, 91-92 
Socrates, 4, 6, j6, 88; household of, 

62 
Sophocles, 75, 189, 267 
Spain, and the League of nations, 

239 

Specialization, 7-10, 104, 130, 137- 
138 

Spectator, 163 

Spencer, Herbert, 91 

Spirit of unrest, 277-281 

Standards for intellectual and moral 
measurement, 291-294; of integ- 
rity, 298 

State educational building at Al- 
bany, 55; Superintendent of pub- 
lic instruction, 56; defined, 197; 
church and state, 4-5, 10-n, 197- 
199 

Steadfast in the faith, 219-226 

Steam navigation, 37 

Stevens, John, 37-38 

Stevens family, 30 

Stoics, 172; conception of liberal, 180 

Stratford-upon-Avon, 350 

Stuart, house of, 375 



39§ 



INDEX 



Stubbs, William, bishop, 120 
Student, president and teacher, 81- 
93; danger of being overlectured, 

92-93 
Students' army training corps, 245- 

249 
Submarine warfare, 222-223 
Success, 319-322 
Suffrage, woman, 159 
Sumner, William G., 120 
Supervision of teachers, 133-134 
Sussex (ship), 240 
Sweden, and the League of Nations, 

239 
Swift, Jonathan, 21 

Tappan, Henry P., 81 

Teachers, true functions of, 87-92; 
the academic career, 113; salaries, 
leave of absence, retiring allow- 
ance, 113-114, 121; types of 
academic teacher, 1 19-123; con- 
tact with practical affairs of life, 
121-123; supervision of, 133-134; 
appointment of, 166-167; re- 
moval of, 168-170; accepting other 
positions, 175-176. See also Pro- 
fessors 

Teaching, freedom of, 12, 63-65, 88, 
115-116, 138, 157-160; lecture 
system, 42, 92-93, 128-129, 134- 
135; methods, 127-130; labora- 
tory instruction, 127-128, 130, 
136; college and university, 133- 
140; psychological presentation of 
facts, 136-137; vocationalization 
and specialization, 137-138 

Tennyson, Alfred, 210, 325 

Teutons. See Germany 

Thanksgiving Day address, 219- 
220 

Thinking, clear, 253-256; for one's 
self, 271-274; forming the habit 
of independent thinking, 314-316 

Thomas Aquinas, 4, 189 

Thoroughness, 325-328 

Thucydides, 189 



Titanic (ship), 320 
Tolstoi, 189 
Townsend family, 30 
Treadwell, Daniel, 31 
Treitschke, Heinrich von, 89 
Trinity Church, 25, 27-28, 34 
Trinity College, Dublin, 31 
Trustees, governors, not adminis- 
trators, 164-165; functions, 166- 
168 
Truth, pursuit of, 198-200 
Tryon, William, 34 
Type of university scholars, 7-10; 
of King's College instructors, 31; 
of academic teachers, 1 19-123 

United States, ideals of conquest, 

245 

University, origin and meaning, 5-6; 
function, 7; types of its schol- 
ars, 7-10; and the city, 14, 27, 
44-45, 49-Si, 138-140; early 
plans for expansion, 39; Dr. 
Johnson's first advertisement in 
1754, 39; scheme for an American 
university, 40; service of, 53-67; 
Canadian universities, 61; defini- 
tion of, 62; imitation by China, 
66; efforts in Europe to develop 
an office similar to the American 
university president, 82-84; true 
functions of the president, teacher, 
and student, 84-85; University 
council, 164; teaching of reason- 
ableness, 215-216; training in 
thinking for one's self, 271-274; 
against lynch-law judgments, 285- 
287. See also College; Columbia 
University; King's College 

Unrest, spirit of, 277-281 

Upper Estate, 35 

Vallery-Radot, Rene, 211 
Van Buren family, 30 
Van Cortlandt, Philip, 30 
Verplanck, Samuel, 30 
Vienna University, 50, 61 



INDEX 



399 



Virgil, 28, 99 

Vocationalization, 137-138, 149-152 

Voltaire, 189 

Wainwright, Jonathan Mayhew, 

Bishop, 41 
War and peace, conquests of, 245- 

249 
War, European. See European war 
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 120, 185 
Washington, George, 20 
Watt family, 30 
Wayland, Francis, 81, 107 
Webster, Daniel, 3 
Wharton, Charles H., 31 



White, Andrew D., 82 

William, German emperor, 233 

Winchester College, 32 

Women, educational opportunities, 

43; suffrage, 159 
World in ferment, address on, 355 j 

358 
Worthy companionship, 209-212; 

contact with the first-rate, 291^ 

294 

Xenophon, 99 

Yale, Elihu, 14-15 

Yale University, 19, 22, 31 



OCT 1 5 1«*» 



